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THE COMMONWEALTH 
AT WAR 



A. F. POLLARD, M.A., Litt.D. 

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 



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In 






PREFACE. 

Half of the following essays have been published as 
leading articles in " The Times " Literary Supplement, 
and of the remainder most have appeared in the " Yale 
Review," the " Contemporary Ile\dew," the " West- 
minster Gazette," and " History " ; and I am indebted 
to the proprietors of these various periodicals for per- 
mission to reprint these papers. Their republication 
may serve to illustrate, among other things, that de- 
ceitfulness of human wishes and fallibility of human 
judgment which a great crisis inevitably enhances. 
But the history of erroneous opinion is an integral 
part of history ; and the future historian of the great 
war will make little of its history if he confines his at- 
tention to actions, and ignores the public and private 
opinion which impeded or inspired them. Conven- 
tional history limits itself too much to what men and 
nations have done, and takes too little account of what 
they hoped to do and thought they were doing. For 
deeds and thoughts react upon one another and to- 
gether make up the human factor in human affairs. 

It is in the hope of assisting the study of history 
that these essays are reproduced in a more permanent 
and accessible form than those in which they first 
appeared ; and the value of contemporary history is 



vi PREFACE 

by no means confined to the age with which it deals. 
It is the essence of the historian's faith that past and 
present help to explain one another ; and the Hght of 
history in the making around us illumines the making 
of histoiy in the past. That is largely because we 
feel the present more than we can ever feel the past, 
and insight into human affairs is as much a matter of 
sense as it is of science. Moreover, it is the process 
of production rather than the finished product which 
interests the real historian, and history is a living 
subject because mankind is always producing and 
never knowing— apart from the mechanical sciences 
— what the finished product will be. Historical 
students will understand the Napoleonic wars all the 
better for having felt a similar tension, and com- 
munion with the past, although a very imperfect 
communion of saints, is essential to the continuous 
life of humanity. 

The date of each of these essays is precisely indi- 
cated so that it may be borne in mind in the criticisms 
they may suggest. There is inevitably some repeti- 
tion, and most of them contain expressions which 
they would not have contained, had they been wiitten 
earlier or later ; but to modify the record of expressed 
opinion in the light of later events indicates a dis- 
honest ambition for consistency or prescience, and is 
one of the most insidious forms of historical forgery. 

A. F. POLLARD. 



CONTENTS. 

PAaE 

Preface , V 

CHAPTER 

I. The War : its History and its Morals ... 1 

II. Rumour and Historical Science in Time of War . 36 

III. The Length of Wars 52 

IV. The Freedom op the Seas 63 

V. The War and the British Realms . . . .75 

VI. British Idealism and its Cost in Wab .... 90 

VII. History and Science 102 

VIII. The Recant of Patriotism 126 

IX. Has Great Britain ceased to be an Island ? . . 134 

X. The Death-Grapple with Prussian Militarism . . 140 

XI. The Growth of an Imperial Parliament . . . 149 

XII. The Temptation of Peace 178 

XIII. Is it Peace ? 187 

XIV. The Peace of the President 198 

XV. Twilight in the East 211 

XVI. The Paradox of the British Empire .... 221 

XVII. The Prevention of War 229 

XVIII. The Ways of Revolution 238 

XIX. A Parable of the War 250 



I. 

THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND ITS 
MORALS.^ 

It has often been remarked, from the time of Aristotle 
downwards, that, while the occasions of great events 
may be trivial, the causes are always profound. This 
distinction between occasions and causes must ever 
be borne in mind when we attempt to trace the origin 
of the Great War of 1914. Occasions for war we 
have always with us ; they are as plentiful as the 
microbes infesting the air we breathe ; and, just as 
our individual health depends, not upon the possi- 
bility of avoiding microbes, but upon the general 
state of our body, so the preservation of the world's 
peace depends, not upon the absence of occasions for 
war, but upon the condition of mind in which the 
peoples and governments of the earth confront them. 
We are not at war because an archduke was murdered, 
but because that occasion for war burst upon one or 
two powers not disinclined to break the peace. If 
we can account for the bellicose attitude of Germany 
and Austria in July, 1914, we can understand the 
outbreak of war ; for, if it is true that it takes two to 
make a quarrel, it is truer that it takes two to keep 
the peace. 

1 A lecture delivered from notes at University College on 5 
October, 1914 ; written out and published in January, 1915. 



2 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

The main problem, therefore, resolves itself into 
the question, Why was Germany not anxious to avoid 
a war ? Austria may almost be eliminated from this 
discussion, because it is clear from the official corre- 
spondence that Austria, if left to herself, would have 
found a means of escape from the dilemma ; and, in- 
deed, war between her and Russia did not begin until 
five days after its declaration by Germany, while six 
days more elapsed before war began between Austria 
and France and Great Britain. The ultimate cause 
of the war must be sought in Germany's frame of 
mind, and that frame of mmd I propose to illustrate 
chiefly by means of two books. Prince von Bidow's 
" Imperial Germany " and Bernhardi's " Germany and 
the Next War". The ex- Chancellor's volume is a 
moderate exposition of German policy which probably 
represents the mind — perhaps the better mind — of the 
German Foreign Office before the outbreak of war. 
Bernhardi's book represents that of the military party 
whose aggressiveness may have had something to do 
with Billow's resignation, and certainly got the better 
of the Kaiser's less truculent inclinations. It is a book 
which many of us have been reading with what 
patience we could command, and perhaps also with 
this amount of comfort — that nothmg done by 
Germany since the war began has done more to com- 
promise her moral position than this revelation of 
Prussian mentality written in time of peace, before 
the first Balkan war or even the Agadir crisis had 
ruffled the surface of affairs. 

As Prince von Biilow points out ^ with some 
humour, it is a German foible to deduce the most 

iPp. 128-9. 



THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 3 

paltry propositions from first principles, and members 
of the Reichstag habitually base amendments to legis- 
lation on their " Conception of the Universe ". So 
General von Bernhardi's politics are deduced from 
what he believes to be " Nature ". It is a crass and 
crude philosophy, and I confess to being bewildered 
by the praise lavished upon the cleverness and pro- 
fundity of his book. According to it the German's 
" nature " is simply the nature of the brute, " red in 
tooth and claw ". The moral part of man is no part 
of his nature, and the natural state is that state of 
war, depicted by Hobbes, in which the two cardinal 
virtues are force and fraud. Bernhardi is thinking, of 
course, only of the relations between State and State, 
and not of those between man and man ; but between 
States there can be no law and no morality ; their re- 
lations are simply those of one brute to another. This 
is a conception not confined to German minds, and it 
may be worth while pointing to some of the confusions 
on which it rests. 

In the first place there is nothing more "un- 
natural," in this sense of the word, than the State 
itself. It depends for its very existence upon the 
repression and control of those "natural" and pre- 
datory instincts, to which Bernhardi would give the 
freest scope in international relations ; and it is a con- 
tradiction in terms to apply " natural " psychology to 
the relations of " unnatural " associations. Moreover, 
when brute fights with brute, it is a small matter ; the 
force employed and the damage done are on a limited 
scale. No brute could mobilize four million fellows. 
It would, indeed, be a horrible comment on civilization 
if, now that Governments can control millions of men 



4 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

and the forces of nature, they could exert no more 
control over their " natural " instincts than the beasts 
of the field. As a matter of fact, this vast control 
over others and over physical force has only been made 
possible by man's control of himself, that is to say, by 
his moral development. But while Bernhardi appar- 
ently regards man's control over physical forces as a 
" natural " evolution, he rules out from man's " nature " 
his moral growth. His State is a super-brute, ever 
growing in strength, but never developing even the 
rudiments of a conscience in its dealings with other 
States. 

" It is proposed," he writes with scorn, " to obviate 
the great quarrels between nations and States by 
Courts of Arbitration — that is, by arrangements. 
A one-sided, restricted, formal law is to be established 
in place of the decisions of history. The weak nation 
is to have the same right to live as the poAverful and 
vigorous nation. The whole idea represents a pre- 
sumptuous encroachment on the natural laws of de- 
velopment." ^ He admits that " Christian morality is 
based on the law of love," but contends that " this law 
can claim no significance for the relations of one country 
to another, since its application to politics would lead to 
a conflict of duties "."^ The logic of this is apparently 
that Christian morality may bind you to love a personal 
enemy, but not a friend who belongs to an enemy 
country. But men's assumptions are more eloquent 
than their assertions, and the assumption underlying 
the last phrase I have quoted is truly enlightening. 
Duty to the State is clearly to be paramount ; any 
other loyalty, such as respect for religion, truth, or 
' Bernhardi, p. 34. - ^ Ibid. p. 29. 



The WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS B 

morality, if it involves conflict with the State, is so 
small a matter that it can have " no significance ". 
It would disparage the great Florentine to call the 
German general with an Italian name "the new 
Machiavelli " ; but he will not have lived in vain, if 
he has unwittingly revealed the pitfalls of the gospel 
of efficiency and of the worship of the State. 

The profound immorality of his political philosophy 
is more than idiosyncrasy. It is characteristic, I do 
not say of the German people, but of the Prussian 
aristocracy which controls the German Government. 
It is perhaps far-fetched to trace, as a German 
Catholic has done,^ the moral insensibility of Prussia 
back to the union of a renegade Grand Master of the 
Teutonic Order and his fellow-celibates with the 
lowest of the Wendish women they were supposed to 
protect from the infidel ; but the Hohenzollerns are 
the collateral descendants of the man who perverted his 
religious trust into a secular duchy, and the Junker 
class in Prussia is sprung from those who followed his 
example. Courage and military capacity they have 
shown throughout their history, but of moral scruple 
or enlightenment there has not been a vestige ; and 
their blunders in this war have all been due to inability 
to realize moral values — failure to comprehend the 
moral strength of the British Empire, the moral 
eflPect of the subordination of international law to 
military advantage, the difference which moral change 
has wi'ought between .the Russia of the Manchurian 
adventure and the Russia of to-day, and even the 
courage which the infliction of wrong would give the 

^ See "Der Untergaiig des Ordenstaates Preussen," von Dr. J. 
Vota. Mainz: Kirchheim & Co., 1911. 



6 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAU 

army of little Belgium. The advocates of schreckUch- 
keit camiot comprehend the proverb that in war he 
wins who feels the pity of it, and their defeat will be 
due to their moral infidelity. 

War is, mdeed, to Bernhardi not a cruel necessity 
but the glorious crown of human achievement. 
" Efforts to secure peace are extraordinarily detri- 
mental to the national health so soon as they influence 
politics. . . . The efforts directed towards the abolition 
of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely 
immoral, and must be stigmatized as unworthy of the 
human race. . . . War is not merely a necessary 
element in the life of nations, but an indispensable 
factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds 
the highest expression of strength and vitality." ^ To 
abolish war would, he thinks, be to abolish heroism. 
This again is one of those simple but fatal fallacies 
which deceive other than German minds. War pro- 
vides opportunities for heroism ; therefore it is a noble 
thing. The heroism, it may be remarked, is commonly 
shown, not by those who order the wars, but by those 
who obey : " theirs not to reason why, theirs but to 
do and die ". The heroism is good, the opportunity 
may be evil. If war provides opportunities, so does 
the loss of a " Birkenhead," a mine-disaster, or a fire. 
Bernhardi is in the logical and moral position of those 
who would wreck a ship, explode a mine, or commit 
arson in order to provide opportunities for other people 
to prove their heroism ; and the proper place for such 
criminals is the jail or the lunatic asylum. Evil is 
none the less evil because it requires heroic remedies. 

The German conception of war is, however, less 

1 Bernhardi, pp. 14, 28, 29, 34. 



THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 7 

detestable than the German conception of peace. 
Peace is to them merely preparation for war ; it is 
war underhand, with its armies of spies, abusing inter- 
national hospitality and acquiring as guests a know- 
ledge to be used as foes, and with its hostility veiled 
only until der Tag shall come. The idea of goodwill 
among men — at least among States — has escaped their 
moral ken. " The English attempts at a rapproche- 
ment,'' wi'ote Bernhardi in 1911,^ " must not blind us to 
the real situation. We may at most use them to delay 
the necessary and inevitable war until we may fairly 
imagine we have some prospect of success." Even 
the sober Biilow declares that " there is no third 
course. In the struggle between nationalities one 
nation is the hammer and the other the anvil." ^ That 
is in peace, and to the " peaceful " rivalry of States 
the German would extend the immoral licence that 
all is fair in war. " You will always be fools," wrote 
a candid German officer to an English friend, " and 
we shall never be gentlemen." It is more significant 
that the German would rather be no gentleman than 
a fool, while the Englishman would rather be a fool 
than not a gentleman. The one would rather break 
the rules than lose the game ; the other would rather 
lose the game than break the rules. " Law," says von 
Biilow,^ " must certainly not be considered sup erior 
to the needs of the State" ; and the problem before 
the civilized world, during and after this war, is how 
to deal with a parvenu, who declines to observe any 
rules in the society into which he has thrust his un- 
welcome presence. 

The German, indeed, denies the foundations of 

1 Bernhardi, p. 287. ^ Billow, p. 240. ^ [jjid, p. 178. 



8 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

international comity ; the weak State has no claim to 
respect nor right of existence. " The whole discussion 
turns," says Bernliardi, " not on an international right, 
but simply and solely on power and expediency " ; ^ 
and the expediency is not the interest of mankind, 
but that of a single over-mighty State. Germany 
must obey the " natural laws of development," and 
any attempt to restrain it by efforts to abolish war 
would be " immoral ". So far as the State is con- 
cerned, " moraUty " is thus identical with " nature," 
and " nature " with the absence of a moral code. If 
the State can seize its neighbour's vineyard, it would 
be immoral because unnatural to refrain. 

But what is the " State," in the interests of which 
Christianity is to be abrogated, morality abolished, 
and all these vast assumptions made ? The question 
is of some importance, because the Prussian conception 
of the State is totally different from the English, and 
also because it appears at first sight psychologically 
inexplicable that a nation like the German, moral in 
its private relations, should so emphatically repudiate 
moral restraint on international conduct. The ex- 
planation lies in the Gerinan conception of the State. 
To the Englishman the State is the community or- 
ganized for political purposes, and he feels, dimly 
perhaps, that he can apply to himself the aphorism 
attributed to Louis XIV and say tEtat, cest moi. 
To the German, on the other hand, the State is a 
thing apart fi*om the community ; it is not the com- 
munity, and though German Social Democrats hold 
that the State exists for the community, the governing 
classes believe tliat the community exists for the 

^ Bernhardi, p. 112. 



THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND iTS MORALS 9 

benefit of the State. To all alike the State is some- 
thing abstract, so abstract indeed that German political 
philosophers have gi-avely discussed the question 
whether it is male or female. To their captains and 
their kings the abstraction is more concrete. The 
Kaiser's view of the State is that of Louis XIV, and 
von Btilow avows that " Prussia is in all essentials a 
State of soldiers and officials ".^ It is not the com- 
munity as a whole ; and nothing surprises an English- 
man more than the violent contrast between the 
overweening claims, which Bernhardi and his fellows 
make for the State, and their contempt for the political 
capacity of the German people. It is not in the 
interests of the German people that the State is to 
be liberated from moral restraints, but in the interests 
of those who control the Government. With that 
the people have nothing to do : Germany has reached 
the stage of constitutional development that England 
had reached under the first two Stuarts, and German 
mmisters hold with Charles I that the " true liberty " 
of German subjects " consists not in the power of 
Government ".^ There is thus nothing illogical in the 
incongruity between the morality of the German 
people and the immorality of the German State ; for 
the people have nothing to do with the State. 

Their political incompetence is, indeed, the dogma 
upon which the Government founds its claim to irre- 
sponsibility, and there is a close psychological comiex- 
ion between the irresponsibility to the German people, 
which the Government has always enjoyed, and the 
irresponsibility to moral considerations which it claims. 

1 Billow, p. 187. 

2 Gardiner, " Select Documents," ed. 1889, p. 285.. 



10 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAB 

" No people," says Beriiliardi,^ " is so little qualified 
as the German to direct its own destinies." " Despite 
the abundance of merits," is von Billow's minor re- 
frain,^ " and gi'eat qualities, with which the German 
nation is endowed, political talent has been denied it. 
. . . We are not a poUtical people. ... I once had a 
conversation on this subject with the late Ministerial 
Director AlthofF. ' Well, what can you expect,' 
replied that distinguished man in his humorous way, 
' AVe Germans are the most learned nation in the 
world and the best soldiers. We have achieved great 
things in all the sciences and arts ; the greatest philoso- 
phers, the greatest poets and musicians are Germans. 
Of late we have occupied the foremost place in the 
natural sciences and in almost all technical spheres, 
and in addition to that we have accomplished an 
enormous industrial development. How can you 
wonder that we are political asses ? There must be a 
weak point somewhere.' " No doubt these eminent 
men, in confessing the political incompetence of the 
German people, made mental exceptions in favour of 
themselves ; but students of recent German policy 
and diplomacy may feel some doubt about the reserva- 
tions. 

After sucli frank admissions, it may seem super- 
fluous to inquire into the reasons which led the German 
people to accept or acquiesce in so fatuous and immoral 
a political philosophy as that expounded by the organs 
of the German militaiy staff. A stupid political phil- 
osophy would naturally commend itself to a politically 
stupid people. Nevertlieless, the future will probably 
show that the Prussian Junker and his chosen ministers 

1 Bernhardi, p. 113. -' Billow, p. lOt). 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 11 

have counted too much upon the political incapacity 
of the German nation. This philosophy is a Prussian 
and not a German product ; the Prussians are German 
in little save language, and German subservience to 
Prussian ideas is a temporary lapse to which the result 
of the war will almost certainly set a term. It none 
the less requires an explanation ; for there are always 
two factors in the production of every crop. There is 
the seed, and there is the soil. The most pernicious, 
as well as the most beneficent, ideas have no effect 
unless they fall on fruitful ground ; and we have to 
examine the conditions which rendered the German 
mind receptive soil for the teaching of Treitschke, to 
whom the predominant school of political philosophy 
owes its inspiration. 

The inquiry involves a brief excursion into history. 
Before the French Revolution there were some 300 
practically independent States in Germany ; and even 
the vast reduction and simplification effected during 
the Napoleonic era still left thirty-nine in existence 
after the battle of \A^aterloo and the Congi-ess of 
Vienna. The problem for Germany in the nineteenth 
century was to combine these separate and often 
hostile States into a single political entity. Political 
methods of union were tried, and failed. " The union 
of Germany," writes von Blilow,^ " that the patriotic 
democrats of the forties conceived in tlie nineteenth 
century was ... to vest the unifying power in the 
paramount influence of an imperial Parliament. . . . 
It was a mistake in a thoroughly monarchical country 
like Germany to expect unifying power from Parlia- 
mentary life which had no existence." Bismarck then 

1 Biilow, p. 274. 



12 The commonwealth at wah 

appeared on the scene with his methods of blood and 
iron, and Btilow thus sums up his achievement : ^ 
" With incomparable audacity and constructive states- 
mansliip, in consummating the work of uniting Ger- 
many, Bismarck left out of play the political capa- 
bilities of the Germans, in which they have never 
excelled, while he called into action their fighting 
powers, which have always been their strongest point." 
This sounds plausible enough ; stripped of the phrase- 
ology, with which Biilow has gilded Bismarck's policy, 
it comes to this : he made aggressive war on other 
people because he could not trust the political capacity 
of his own. Denmark, Austria, and France were the 
successive whetstones on which Bismarck sharpened 
the sword of Prussian militarism, the weapon where- 
with he wrought that German unification which had 
defied the political efforts of the German people. 
What wonder that Germany puts its trust in the God 
of Battles, believes in the methods of blood and iron, 
and drops all pretence to popular government when- 
ever the bugle sounds ? 

Blood and iron became the cement of the German 
Empire ; but Bismarck, to do him justice, never re- 
garded his methods as ideal. He adopted them only 
because there were none other available. His pigmy 
successors have out-Bismarcked and caricatured his 
methods. They advocate war, not as a legitimate 
means when otiiers have failed, but as a method in 
itself almost ideal, or at least preferable to all others. 
Bernhardi, for instance,^ glories in his belief that all 
the wars of his hero, Frederick the Great, were ag- 
gressive, and contends that the value to Prussia and 

1 Bulow, p. 8. • ^ P. 34. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS IS 

Germany of Silesia consisted mainly in the method of 
its acquisition, in the fact that it was won by war and 
not awarded by a Court of Arbitration. In other 
words, if you come by your own as the result of ju- 
dicial process, your triumph leaves no moral impress ; 
but if you successfully rob your neighbour by war, the 
moral effect is portentous. What a gulf between the 
Prussian of the twentieth, and the great English 
soldier of the seventeenth century I " Things obtained 
by force," said Oliver Cromwell in 1647, " though 
never so good in themselves, would be both less to 
their honour, and less likely to last. . . . What we 
gain in a free way, it is better than twice as much in 
a forced, and will be more truly ours and our pos- 
terity's." ^ Less likely to last ! Doubts of Bern- 
hardi's gospel seem to have haunted von Btilow. " In 
the meantime," he writes,^ " Fate, who, as we all 
know, is an excellent but expensive teacher, might 
undertake to educate us politically, and that by means 
of the injuries which our innate political failings must 
inflict on us again and again. Failings, even political 
ones, are seldom cured by knowledge, mostly only by 
experience. Let us hope that the experience, which 
shall enable us to acquire a political talent in addition 
to so many other fine gifts, will not be too painful 
a one." An enemy may concur in von Billow's as- 
piration, and the experience which will enable the 
Germans to acquire a political talent will be the de- 
struction of Prussian militarism at the hands of the 
Allies. 

As yet, nothing has succeeded in Germany like 
success, and the system of force became the bond of 
1 Morley's " Cromwell," p. 224. 2 p. io5. 



U THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

German unity. In the Hohenzollerns and the Army 
the German has seen his only bulwarks against dis- 
ruption and his only claim to the respect and fear of 
the world. Tliat is why his civic soul cringes under 
the jackboot, and he seeks to solace his self-esteem by 
humbling little nations. The root of his militarism is 
his disbelief in his own political aptitude ; he vaunts 
the War Lord, with his " mailed fist " and " shining 
armour," because he is conscious of the truth in Bern- 
hardi's insolent gibe that no people is less quahfied to 
determine its own political destinies. After all it is 
Imman nature to exalt the art in which one excels and 
to vilify that in which one has failed. Militarism is 
not merely the price which Germany pays for its 
political incapacity ; it is also the unction with which 
it flatters its materialistic soul. 

Nevertheless, no nation — not even the German — 
tolerates militarism for its own sake, but only for 
what it derives therefi'om in prestige or tangible profit ; 
and doubts have been growing in the minds of millions 
of Germans whether militarism was worth the price 
they had to pay. These doubts are expressed in the 
growth of the Social Democratic movement, the 
essence of which is not its socialism at all. " The 
Social Democratic movement," says von Bulow,^ " is 
tlie antithesis of the Prussian State." But the Prussian 
State is the most socialistic in Europe, so far as its 
methods of government are concerned ; and the anti- 
thesis turns not on socialistic or individualistic prin- 
ciple, but on the question whetlier the people are to 
control the State or the State the people, or, in otlier 
words, whether Germany is to have a responsible 

iP. 18fi. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 15 

government or not. To Prussian soldiers and min- 
isters, as to the Stuarts, the demand for responsible 
government portends the destruction of their State ; 
and in its defence they are prepared to wage a civil or 
any other war. " From first to last during my term 
of office," says that mildest of Prussian ministers, von 
Billow,^ " I recognized that the Social Democratic 
movement constituted a great and serious danger. It 
is the duty of every German ministry to combat this 
movement until it is defeated or materially changed. 
. . . This danger must be faced and met with a great 
and comprehensive national policy under the strong 
guidance of clear-sighted and courageous governments, 
which whether amicably or by fighting can make the 
parties bow to the might of the national idea." 

The " national idea " is the Prussian conception 
of the State, and the growth of the German revolt 
against it can be illustrated by a few figures. In 1884 
the Social Democrats polled 550,000 votes and secured 
24 seats in the Reichstag. In 1912 they polled 
4,250,000 votes, secured 110 seats, and emerged from 
the general election the strongest party in the Reich- 
stag.'^ In 1913, for the first time in its history, the 
elected representatives of the great German people 
summoned up courage, over the Zabern incident, to 
pass a vote of censure on the Government ; and be- 
fore the outbreak of war, it was the common antici- 
pation that at the revision of the Tariff, due in 1915, 
the Prussian Junkers would fail to secure that protec- 
tion which represents the perquisites most of them 
get out of the Prussian State. The call was urgent 
for von Billow's " great and comprehensive national 
iPp. 171, 204, 2 Pp. ]67.8. 



16 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

policy ". Probably he was not thinking of war ; but 
Bernhardi has a significant sentence : ^ " We must 
not think merely of external foes who compel us to 
fight. A war may seem to be forced upon a states- 
man by the condition of home affairs." 

Here we have at least one explanation of the ever- 
increasing truculence of German foreign policy. To 
seek in aggression abroad a remedy for discontent at 
home is an expedient as old as the State itself, and 
German aggression has been due to the German 
Government's fear of the German people. Blood 
and iron must justify itself to the German nation by 
its fruits ; and German Governments have been forced 
to seek abroad the means to bribe the German people 
into acquiescence in the insolence of military rule. 
Bernhardi speaks of the " obligation " w^hich lies upon 
the German Government to acquire colonies ; " if 
necessary, they must be obtained as the result of 
a successful European war," and " the principle of 
the balance of power must be entirely disregarded ".^ 
The megalomania of Germany's ruler made him a 
suitable exponent of the exigencies of German policy. 
As far back as 1898 he declared at Damascus : ^ " The 
300,000,000 Mohammedans who live scattered over 
the globe may be assured of this, that the German 
Emperor will be their friend at all times ". ISlost of 
these Mohammedans were French or British subjects, 
and it is not usual for sovereigns to offer tlieir protec- 
tion to the subjects of other States. It was not 
because they were German subjects, but because they 
were not that, as Bernhardi says,* "prestige in the 

1 Bernhardi, p. .38. "^ Ibid. pp. 107, lOp. 

3 Biilow, p. 8;J. * Bernhardi, p. 285. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 17 

Mohammedan world is of the first importance to 
Germany ". Germany was already seeking means 
to fish in its neighbours' troubled waters, but 100,000 
Mohammedans are giving to-day in France an unex- 
pected answer to the Kaiser's invitation. 

France has, however, been the nearest victim of 
Germany's restless provocation. " In one way or 
another," declares Bernhardi,^ "we must square our 
account with France if we wish for a free hand in our 
international policy. This is the first and foremost 
condition of a sound German policy, and since the 
hostility of France once for all cannot be removed by 
peaceful overtures, the matter must be settled by 
force of arms. France must be so completely crushed 
that she can never again come across our path." If 
France did not oblige by taking the offensive, she 
must be jockeyed into war. " We must initiate an 
active policy which, without attacking France, will 
so prejudice her interests or those of England, that 
both these States would feel themselves compelled to 
attack us."^ And then, too, of course it would be 
easy to persuade the United States and other neutrals 
that Germany was the victim of an envious and re- 
vengeful coalition,^ and that Bernhardi was not 
serious when he declared in italics that " the mainten- 
ance of peace never can or may be the goal of a 
policy ".* 

Let us think for a moment over the significance 
of this declaration, made four years ago, that "we 
must square our account with France," which " must 
be so completely crushed that she can never again 

1 Bernhardi, p. 105. "^ Ihid. p. 105. 

3 Ibid. p. 280. 4 Ihid. p. 37. 



18 THE\COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

come across our path ". That is the German concep- 
tion of a " square " account ; it squares, at least, with 
German notions of international guarantees and scraps 
of paper in general. The demand for a square account 
might seem more natural coming from the other side. 

In 1870-1 Germany occupied the French capital, 
marched her armies across to the shores of the ocean, 
tore away two French provinces, and exacted a vast 
indemnity. And yet she must be crushed again ; 
Moloch is still insatiate. What a vista, what a com- 
ment on the gospel of war ! The most crushing 
victory of modern times is, even so, powerless to 
effect the bloody purpose of the prophets of the 
sword. Their chosen weapon has broken in their 
hands, and war, even triumphant war, is bankrupt in 
a generation. No victory is of any use unless the 
vanquished falls never to rise again ; and then the 
victor, for lack of a foe, is reduced to ignominious 
peace! It is not, after all, war in which Bernhardi 
revels ; the lust of battle is purity itself compared 
with the black passions of his heart. If he really 
beheved in war as the sovereign tonic for civilized 
peoples, he would not clamour for his foes' annihila- 
tion ; he would rejoice in their recovery and hope to 
meet again in equal combat a foeman worthy of his 
steel. No, it is not fair fight and no favour for which 
the Prussian thirsts ; the consuming fire within him 
is oriental lust for absolute dominion. 

It is the recovery of France, which would have 
been welcomed by a chivalrous enemy, that constitutes 
her offence in German eyes. She has dared to revive, 
and, turning her saddened gaze from Alsace and 
Lorraine, to devote her energies to the building up 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 19 

of a colonial empire second to that of Britain alone. 
" Our old vice, envy," as von Blilow frankly calls 
it,^ is the root of German malice tov^ards France, 
and perhaps towards Belgium also. " When," writes 
Bernhardi,^ " Belgium was proclaimed neutral, no 
one contemplated that she would lay claim to a large 
and valuable region of Africa. It may well be asked 
whether the acquisition of such territory is not ipso 
facto a breach of neutrality ; for a State from which 
— theoretically at least — all danger of war has been 
removed, has no right to enter into political competi- 
tion with the other States." This passage almost 
reduces German politics to a branch of criminology. 
Belgium was to leave the Congo free for a German 
scramble because Belgium was " theoretically at least " 
free from the menace of German invasion ! But 
would the surrender of the Congo State have made it 
any easier for the German army to advance on Paris 
across the Vosges instead of through Belgian territory, 
or have fortified Germany's respect for " scraps of 
paper " ? 

With Germany led by such philosophers and 
guides, the way to war must ever be facilis descensus 
Ave7iio. The point of view of the man in the street 
was put by a German on the eve of the outbreak : 
" Germany always wins in war, and always gets 
something out of it ". He knew no more about the 
rights, or wrongs of the dispute, but his knowledge 
was quite enough. " I beseech you," wrote Cromwell 
to the Presbyterians who rushed to defeat at Dunbar, 
"to think it possible that you may be mistaken." 
When a State like Germany disclaims responsibility 

1 Biilow, p. 184. 2 Bernhardi, p. 110. 



20 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

to law and ethics, the only guarantee for peace is its 
fear of defeat in war. Germany had no such fear in 
a contest with France and Russia, in which she was 
backed by Austria ; and she had no suspicion that 
Britain would intervene. Hence, when the occasion 
for war arose, the cause was present in Germany's 
fi-ame of mind. She beheved in war as the sovereign 
means of national development ; she had little doubt 
of her success, and what risks there were her Govern- 
ment was impelled to take from fear of .the Social 
Democratic menace to the Prussian State. The causes 
of the war indicate the only sound bases of peace : 
Germany's faith in the supreme efficacy of war must 
be undermined, her overweening confidence must be 
destroyed, and her people must realize the impossibility 
of satisfactory government under a State which can 
be driven into war by fear of its own subjects. 

It was a similar distrust of its owti subjects on 
the part of Austria that provoked the occasion of the 
war. There would have been no need to treat the 
Archduke's assassination as a casus belli, had the 
Austro-Hungarian State enjoyed the confidence of 
its Bosnian subjects. For, after all, that murder was 
a crime committed by Austrian subjects. Therein, 
indeed, lay its terrifying significance for the Austrian 
Government ; and, paradoxical though it may seem, 
there would have been less likelihood of war between 
Austria and Serbia, had the assassins been Serbian 
subjects. It was Slav discontent within the Austrian 
Empire that drove the Austrian Government to a 
settlement of accounts with Serbia ; and there is 
evidence that that determination had been formed be- 



THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 21 

fore the crime of Serajevo. The root of the evil goes 
back to Bismarck's MachiaveUian encouragement of 
Austrian expansion at the expense of the Slavs in the 
Balkans, given with a double intent, firstly to set up 
a permanent rivalry between Russia and Austria and 
thus to provide Germany with a firm ally in her own 
disputes with Russia, and secondly to make Austro- 
Hungary less and less a Germanic State and thus 
leave Germany the sole exponent of Teutonic am- 
bitions. The five Austrian duchies, which are almost 
purely Germanic, with a possible outlet on the 
Mediterranean, would be Germany's reward for the 
conversion of the Habsburg monarchy into a non- 
Germanic state. Hence the Austrian administration 
and, in 1908, annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
That annexation, carried out in defiance of a 
European settlement and only made feasible by the 
weakness of Russia, consequent upon the Manchurian 
war and domestic revolution, was a blow at the heart 
of Slav aspirations. It was prepared by a bogus con- 
spiracy, the supposed proofs of which were forged in 
the Austrian Legation at Belgrade ; and the facts re- 
vealed at the famous Friedjung trial make it impos- 
sible to accept at its face value the Austrian version 
of the subsequent murder at Serajevo. The effect of 
the annexation was to deepen Bosnian discontent, and 
the success of their Serbian kinsmen in the Balkan 
wars revived the confidence of Slav aspirations. Ser- 
bian prosperity became a menace to the Austrian 
Empire because Austria had not known how to con- 
cihate Bosnian sentiment ; and every symptom of 
discontent with Austrian repression was ascribed, not 
to the defects of Austrian rule, but to the instigation 



22 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

of Serbian intrigue. The Nemesis of the Bosnian 
annexation was that Austria could not feel secure so 
long as a Serbian State remained independent on its 
borders to act as a magnet for Slav attraction. It led 
to increased coercion within the Empire, and pointed 
towards an ultimate Austrian advance to Salonica. 
This Austrian threat might have been parried by the 
maintenance of a Balkan League strong enough to 
secure the Balkan Peninsula against outside aggres- 
sion. Unfortunately, in their anxiety to avoid a 
European conflict, the Powers of the Triple Entente 
connived at German and Austrian interference to pre- 
vent a Balkan settlement which would have satisfied 
the various members of the Balkan League. Austria 
was thus provided with the opportunity to break up 
Balkan unity, and get Serbia, as she thought, at her 
mercy. But for the refusal of Italy to support her, 
Austria's ultimatum to Serbia would have been de- 
livered in 1913. 

Its terms in 1914 were not intended for acceptance, 
and the object of military operations was to secure 
Austria's predominance in the Balkans.^ Bernhardi's 
dictum that " in no case may a sovereign State re- 
nounce the right of interfering in the affairs of other 
States " ^ — which might have justified Serbian intrigues 
in Bosnia — was invoked to justify Austria's interven- 

1 There is ;in unfortunate misprint in Document No. 90 of the 
cheap reprint of the British " White Paper," where Sir Edward 
Grey is made to say : " I observed that, hy taking territory, while 
leaving nominal Servian independence, Austria might turn Servia 
practically into a vassal State ". " By " should be " without," and 
it is coi-rectly so printed in the original issue of the " White Paper ". 

^ Bernhardi, p. 111. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 23 

tion in Serbia, and then repudiated to condemn the 
intervention of Russia. Germany insisted that the 
quarrel was purely a matter for Austria and Serbia to 
decide, but denied that it was one for Russia and 
Austria to fight out between them, and suddenly de- 
clared war on Russia in order to frustrate the pour- 
parlers to which Austria had consented. Protesta- 
tions that Germany did not take the offensive have 
flooded neutral countries, and they will be redoubled as 
the war spreads over German territory. But the ver- 
dict of Germany's ally is decisive ; on 1 August, Italy's 
Foreign Minister, the Marquis di San Giuliano, de- 
clared : ^ " The war undertaken by Austria, and the 
consequences which might result had, in the words of 
the German Ambassador himself, an aggressive ob- 
ject. Both were, therefore, in conflict with the purely 
defensive character of the Triple Alliance, and in such 
circumstances Italy would remain neutral." Germany 
herself has never ventured to contend that Italian 
neutrality was any breach of the Triple AUiance, 
which it would have been, had not Germany been the 
aggressor. 

In this Balkan quarrel, and even in the wider 
struggle between Teuton and Slav, Britain had no 
immediate concern, and would certainly not have 
intervened. There might even have been some sym- 
pathy with Germany's apprehension at the growth of 
Slavonic power. But Germany had already done 
much to ruin her own contention, and was prompt to 
complete the work. If the great issue was between 
Teuton and Slav, what was the point of the Agadir 

1" White Paper," No. 152. 



24 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

incident and of the menace to Britain's naval supre- 
macy ? If self-defence against Russia was her mo- 
tive, why ^dolate Belgium's neutrality and prepare 
a " smashing blow " against France ? The Russian 
menace was clearly no more than a pretext for hurry- 
ing on der Tag, If Germany feared a French 
attack in the rear, while her face was turned towards 
Russia, she could have relied on the strength of the 
Rhine frontier and awaited a French aggression. In 
that case there need have been no violation of Bel- 
gian neutrality or casting of " scraps of paper " to the 
winds, and there would have been no Britisli inter- 
vention. Germany knew well enough that France 
was unprepared ; indeed, that knowledge helped to 
precipitate war, and the strategy of the " smashing 
blow " was based on the assumption that it would 
have to deal with nearer 500,000 than 4,000,000 
French troops with proper equipment. One does 
not expect in modern war to smash 4,000,000 vnth. 
1,000,000. Germany's knowledge was not at fault ; 
her colossal blunder arose from her blindness to moral 
forces. She prostituted her honour at the shrine of 
military advantage, and learned too late that moral 
forces heavily weight even the scales of war. The 
final price the Germans will pay for their militarism 
will be due to the fact that they sold their conscience 
to their General Staff. 

The legend of a French plan to attack Germany 
through Belgium was merely an ex post facto excuse 
for Germany's conduct, for which, even though the 
legend were true, there would have been no justifica- 
tion, unless Belgium had connived at the breach of 
her neutrality ; and Germany need only have waited 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 25 

for the imputed invasion by France to secure the 
invaluable assets of Belgian assistance and British 
neutrahty. Germany thinks that preparations, which 
were not in fact made, on the part of Britain and 
France to resist a German breach of Belgium's neu- 
trahty were in themselves a breach of neutrahty, and 
that defence against Germany is oflFence to Germany. 
Her Government was quite aware that France had 
no possible motive for infringing Belgian neutrality 
and thus opening a route to Paris, which for more 
than two years the German General Staff had been 
convinced was the best. It is incredible that the 
German Government would not have delayed its 
attack on France a few days, if it really beUeved in a 
French attack upon Belgium ; and its belief in its 
own assertions can only be accepted at the expense of 
its sanity. 

But there is no need to labour the pomt ; the 
German Government has flatly contradicted itself. 
On the very day (4 August) on which the German 
Foreign Office informed its Ambassador in England 
that it had " absolutely unimpeachable evidence " for 
the French attack on Belgium, the German Foreign 
Secretary told the British Ambassador in Berhn that 
German armies had crossed the Belgian frontier be- 
cause " they had to advance into France by the quickest 
and easiest way, so as to be able to get well ahead 
with their operations and endeavour to strike some 
decisive blow as early as possible. It was a matter 
of life and death for them, as if they had gone by the 
more southern route they could not have hoped, in 
view of the paucity of roads and the strength of the 
fortresses, to have got through without formidable 



26 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

opposition, entailing great loss of time."^ The mili- 
tarism of the German Government is profound and 
fundamental : it thinks truth, honour, and mterna- 
tional law can be manipulated and mobilized as 
though they were armies. Belgium had been the 
cockpit of Europe for centuries : in 1839 the Powers, 
including Prussia, guaranteed Belgium's neutrality, 
hoping thus to preclude the worst danger of European 
conflict. Relying upon this guarantee, the French 
concentrated their efforts upon the defence of the 
Alsace-Lorraine frontier. Germany was thus offered 
a choice of obstacles, one presented by military science, 
the other by Germany's honour and international law. 
She did not hesitate ; she cast honour and scraps of 
paper to the winds, and then pretended that France 
had done the like. The Imperial Chancellor admitted 
in the Reichstag the wrong the Germans had done. 
We agree with him about the wi'ong ; we disagree 
when he thinks it is for the criminal to fix the amount 
of his penalty. 

It was then, and only then, that Great Britain 
intervened. Among the endless contradictory legends 
as to the origin of the war, which Germany has 
evolved since it became evident that she would be 
reduced to the defensive, there is the fable of a British 
conspiracy in which Russia and France were our facile 
tools. German promptitude is remarkable, but some- 
times it is a little too previous. In the German 
" White Book," prepared after the breach with Russia, 
but before the breach with England, and translated 
by Germans into what purports to be English for 
American consumption, the object is to secure Ameri- 
1 British "White Paper," Nos. 157, l60. 



THE WAR : ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 27 

can sympathy for the Germans against the Slav, and 
the world is told that "shoulder to shoulder with 
England " Germany " labored incessantly " for the 
preservation of peace. ^ But war with England fol- 
lowed on the heels of this narrative ; truth had to 
be tuned to the " Hymn of Hate," and England's 
co-operation with Germany in the cause of peace was 
transfigured into a conspiracy with Russia and France 
for the purpose of war. A'^erily, truth, like kultm% is 
to the German the handmaid of the German State. 

The continental war was made in Germany ; 
Great Britain's intervention was our own affair. We 
might have stood aloof, and Germany tried to pur- 
chase our connivance in her crime. We were not, in 
the strict letter of international law, bound to inter- 
vene. AVhat the Treaty of 1839 does is to bind its 
signatories not to idolate Belgian neutrality, and to 
give each one of them the right to intervene in case 
of violation by another. Great Britain, by standing 
aloof, would have countenanced but not committed 
a violation of international law ; intervention was a 
moral and not a legal obligation. It was, therefore, a 
debt of honour, and its repudiation would have de- 
stroyed her credit ; her treaties would have become, 
indeed, mere scraps of paper, and her name a byword 
and reproach. It is true that no nation has been 
without reproach in the past ; but if one is to wait to 
do right until one can do right with a conscience void 
of offence in the past, one will never do right at all ; 
and criminal precedents are no justification for crime. 
We should have suffered ignominy, even if Russia 

^ " Germany's Reasons for War with Russia '' (Oxford Reprint), 
p. 137. 



28 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

and France had succeeded without our assistance. If 
they had failed, we should have lost our honour with- 
out the miserable compensation of ignoble security. 
An enormous indemnity would have been extorted 
from France and devoted to building German super- 
Dreadnoughts. Dutch integrity would have followed 
Belgian into Germany's ravenous maw^ ; for, as their 
statesmen have obligingly pointed out, they " could 
not profitably amiex Belgian territory without making 
at the same time territorial acquisitions at the expense 
of Holland ".^ Sooner or later der Tag would have 
come for us as well as for France and Russia, and we 
should have had to fight for existence wdth a foe of 
doubled power but without our Allies' help. 

From that at least we are saved ; and it is more 
to the pomt to consider our attitude in the event of 
victory. It is ill counting one's chickens before they 
are hatched, but at least one may venture a protest 
against some popular forms of enumeration ; and 
nothing could be more unwise than the disposition 
to make the Kaiser a scapegoat for Germany's sins. 
His responsibility is heavy, and no one need fear that 
retribution will be light. But we are dealing with 
States ; our contention is that the German people, 
misled and deceived as they doubtless have been, have 
yet lent themselves to and supported this crime 
agamst civilization ; and some of them have been far 
more eager than the Kaiser himself to commit it. It 
is none of our business or that of our Allies to fix the 
redistribution of the responsibility between the various 
elements in the German State ; that is a matter of 
internal politics, and must be left to the German 

1 British " White Paper," No. 157. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 29 

people themselves. It will be no concern of ours if 
after the war they think they have had enough of the 
HohenzoUerns, and deal with the Kaiser as their 
friends, the young Turks, dealt with their Sultan 
Abdul. The penalty must be imposed on Germany 
as a whole, and the German people must be left to 
share it among themselves. The different course 
adopted, perhaps inevitably, with Napoleon in 1815 
had deplorable results. His exile at St. Helena 
turned French sympathy in his favour, and led to the 
growth of the Napoleonic legend. On that legend 
the Second Empire was largely based, and the Second 
Empire was partly responsible for the Franco-Prussian 
war, from which this greater war has flowed. Any 
attempt on the part of the Allies to mete out similar 
treatment to the Kaiser would have like results. His 
punishment must be left to German hands ; if the 
German people choose to absolve him and shoulder 
the burden themselves, they must be allowed to do so. 
It is, however, unlikely that they will be in a forgiving 
mood, and the lightest penalty that will result from a 
German defeat will be the loss by the HohenzoUerns 
of their irresponsible power. 

Our second caution refers to Alsace-Lorraine. The 
guiding principle of any settlement must be popular 
consent, and it is probable that a plebiscite taken after 
a French victory would restore those provinces to 
France. It does not follow that that would be the 
wisest course. Alsace and Lorraine were German 
before they were French, and re-annexation would 
leave a large and discontented minority. The borders 
of France and Germany would still march together, 
and fear of a German revanche would continue to 



30 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

haunt the peace of Europe and speed the race for 
armaments. These provinces are a real borderland 
with a divided allegiance which cannot be wholly 
satisfied in one or the other scale. It might be better 
to recognize the fact, and not attempt to impose either 
nationality. If Alsace-Lorraine were neutralized, and 
connected by some federal bond for purposes of de- 
fence with Luxemburg, Belgium, and Holland on the 
one hand, and with Switzerland on the other, there 
would be a complete and continuous barrier between 
the rival claimants, and Western Europe would enjoy 
a secure prospect of permanent peace. 

The objection will at once be made that the fate 
of Belgium proves the worthlessness of guaranteed 
neutrahty. But this objection ignores two funda- 
mental points. In the first place, we are considering 
arrangements contingent upon a victory for the Allies ; 
and if they win, the penalty inflicted for the breach 
of Belgium's neutrahty will be enough to deter any 
power fi'om following German examples for se^^eral 
generations. Secondly, Germany was only tempted 
to violate Belgian neutrality by the fact that she could 
violate it without violating the neutrality of any other 
State. Belgium would not have suffered that vio- 
lation had she retained her union witli Holland, 
established at the Congress of Vienna ; and neither 
Germany nor any other power would have dreamt, or 
would dream, of violatuig a neutrality which compre- 
hended within its scope Holland, Belgium, Luxem- 
burg, Alsace-I^orraine, and Switzerland. None of 
these States entertains any military design save that 
of defence, or cherishes any ambition save that of 
peaceful development ; they might be well content to 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 31 

pool their arrangements for defence and thus promote 
their peaceful development. 

The application of the principles of nationality and 
government by consent to the problems of Eastern 
Europe is too complex a matter to be discussed in a 
lecture ; and the soundness of the general principle is 
too obvious to require elaboration. Its denial has 
been the poison of the European system, and the 
bond of iniquity between Germany and her Allies. 
Turkey, says Bernhardi, is the "natural" ally of 
Germany ; and the similarity of their proceedings in 
Armenia and Belgium illustrates that natural affinity. 
Each of the partners is a militarist State, repudiating 
the principle of responsible government, and ruling 
by coercion heterogeneous nationalities. They are 
bound together by a common interest, and that 
interest is fatal to the peace and comfort of European 
peoples. These governments are forced to apply the 
methods of military coercion to large sections of their 
own subjects ; and from the dragooning of theii* own 
subjects it is but a step to dragooning those of other 
States. From plaguing Germany, militarism has 
spread like a plague over Europe, and its noxious 
effects have been felt to the uttermost ends of the 
earth. 

Indeed, while nationality lies deep in the problems 
of this war, it is something far more profound than a 
war of nation against nation. It is the great civil war 
of the human race, and upon its issue depend the 
principles of the government of men. No nation can 
live to itself in selfish isolation. All are members of 
the great society, and each one stands for something 
in that social intercourse. Germany stands, by her 



32 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

owii presumptuous boast, for the mailed fist and 
shining armour, for the law of nature, " red in tooth 
and claw," for the limitless rights of might. For what 
do we stand ? We are told that we are fighting German 
culture. The word is a somewhat ambiguous term, and 
the charge is one we can bear with some equanimity. 
But we are not fighting the culture of Goethe and 
Schiller, of Lessing and Kant. That was destroyed 
long since by the Prussians themselves ; and, to quote 
words I wrote twelve years ago,^ " in the Germany of 
the nineteenth, as in that of the sixteenth, century an 
era of liberal thought closed in a fever of war ; the 
persuasions of sweetness and light were drowned by 
the beat of the drum and the blare of the trumpet ; 
and methods of blood and iron supplanted the forces 
of reason ". We are not seeking the destruction of 
German culture ; we hope to be the means of its re- 
surrection when its destroyer is vanquished. 

We stand " for scraps of paper," for tlie sanctity 
of international honour, for the security of the little 
nations. No one pretends or desires to make the 
nations of the world equal in strength or political 
weight, any more than anyone dreams of making equal 
the physical strength of individual men and women. 
But we all know that the greatest achievement of 
civilization is this : that physical strength is not used 
to terrorize physical weakness. It is excellent to have 
a giant's strength, it is tyi-amious to use it like a giant : 
and under the shield of civilization the weakest as well 
as the strongest, man or woman, goes about his duty 
with equal security. So we take our stand by the 
integrity and independence of the least of those little 

1 " Cambridge Modern History," II, 278-9. 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 33 

nations to whom we owe so much in rehgion, hterature, 
science, and art ; and we contend that they, trusting 
to scraps of paper with our superscription, should not 
fear the power of mailed fists and shining armour, but 
continue in peace to serve their day and generation. 

It is a war of principles and of ideals. We believe 
in poHtical, no less than in religious, toleration. Ger- 
man pontics stand for eternal intolerance. Hammer 
and anvil, anvil and hammer — such, it appears, must 
ever be the relation of State to State. It is an old 
German antithesis : " either he or I," said Luther of 
his fellow-Protestant, Zwingli, " must be the devil's 
minister ". Either France or Germany, say his modern 
disciples, must go to the wall. Until one Church had 
learnt to put up with the existence of other Churches, 
there could be no religious peace ; and until Germany 
has learnt or been taught to tolerate, not merely the 
existence but also the wealth and strength of its 
neighbours, there can be no peace upon earth and 
goodwill towards men. The gospel according to 
Germany involves a denial of every international 
principle and every idea save that of force ; it opens a 
vista of ceaseless war, or of war that can only cease 
with the destruction of Prussian militarism or the 
subjection of every State to Prussian dictation. 

Against this whole system of Prussian politics we 
have taken our stand. We have done so with delib- 
eration, and it is we who declared war in defence of 
our honour and civilization against the invaders of 
Belgium. It is no service to England's reputation to 
dissemble that fact or deny that she did her duty by 
choice and not by compulsion. We did our duty, not 
because we had no option, but because it was our 



34 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

duty ; and we refused the German bribes to keep the 
peace. We are most of us lovers of peace, but not at 
Germany's price. That is the pacifism of the poUce- 
man who turns his back while Naboth is stoned to 
death and his vineyard robbed ; and the supreme value 
of our action does not consist in the fact that this 
particular Naboth will be recompensed and restored. 
It consists in the fact that the peoples of the world 
will have the assurance of deeds, which speak louder 
than words, that we will do the like again whenever 
another Ahab covets his neighbour's vmeyard. 

" But have you counted the cost ? " asked the 
German Imperial Chancellor ; " has the British Gov- 
ernment thought of that ? " Yes, we ha^ e counted 
the cost, and we pay the price on many a stricken 
field, in many a desolate home. But we also thovight 
of the paffgs of conscience involved in the great be- 
trayal. While Reims was being ruined and Louvain 
levelled with the dust, and pitiful, penniless, fugitives 
flocked to our shores with their records of deeds of 
shame, the doers thereof would, if we had stood aloof, 
have overwhelmed us with felicitations upon our wis- 
dom, our prudence, and our discretion ; and we should 
have been racked with the doubt that, but for our 
inaction, these things might not have been. We have 
not, indeed, prevented the spoiler, but for every deed 
we shall help to exact the last farthing of retribution ; 
and our honour remains intact. Yes, we have counted 
the cost ; and the heart of England goes out to those 
who suffer and those who sorrow. And yet our 
mother country looks upon the travail of her soul and 
is content. For in the fullness and depth of her com- 
passion, she can say to each one of her afflicted children, 



THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS 35 

in the words of the old cavaher poet, which also 

express the profoundest of the truths upon which 

this empire is based, and for which this war is now 

fought : — 

I could not love thee, dear, so much 
Loved I not honour more. 



II. 

RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN 
TIME OF AVAR/ 

Two years ago the Annual Address to the Historical 
Association was given by Professor Spenser Wilkin- 
son, and he concluded with the following words : — 

" Apparently the statesmen of Vienna were afraid 
that a well-governed and a prosperous Servia would 
exercise too great an attraction upon the Serbs of 
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia. 
Two courses were open to them. One would be to 
counterbalance the outside attraction by specially good 
administration and specially liberal institutions for the 
Serbs of Austria. The other was to limit by CA^ery 
means the possibilities of the two Serb Kingdoms. 
Austrian statesmen had hitherto seemed to prefer the 
second alternative. . . . But Russian national senti- 
ment was deeply attached to the prosperity of Bul- 
garia and Servia, and an Austrian attack upon Servia, 
unless it were provoked by some improbable criminal 
folly on the part of the Serbs, Avould render it almost 
impossible for any Russian Government not to take 
action to assist Servia. In that case, according to the 
German Chancellor, Germany would feel called upon 

^ The substance of the Annual Address delivered before the 

Historical Association on 8 January, 1915 ; reprinted from the 

"Contemporary Review," March, 19"! 5. 

36 



HUMOUR At^n HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 37 

to come to Austria's assistance, and it was evident 
that France could not decline to co-operate with her 
Russian Ally. The problem for British statesmen 
was whether, in the eventuality thus seen to be pos- 
sible, Great Britain could remain neutral consistently 
with her own self-respect and with the position she 
had hitherto held as a European Power. That was 
the issue which made it desirable that Englishmen 
should make up their minds while there was time re- 
garding the country's duty in Europe, and concerning 
the necessity of national organization for war." ^ 

These words are a sufficiently striking illustration 
of the foresight which historical training may induce ; 
but my object is to illustrate another aspect of the 
advantages of historical education, and show how 
some acquaintance with historical technique should 
help us to deal with rumour in time of war. It must 
be admitted that the reading of text-books or histories 
is of little value for this purpose, except in so far as a 
general knowledge of history provides a background 
for present events, and thus makes possible a sense of 
perspective, which should act as a prophylactic against 
extravagant hopes or fears. But the historical science 
to which I refer consists of those methods of investi- 
gation and principles of evidence, by means of which 
we determine or' seek to determine the truth about 
past events. For, if there is any substance in our 
claim by historical methods to establish historical 
truth, the application of those methods should enable 
us, to some extent at any rate, to sift the grain from 
the chaiF in the masses of rumour with which we have 
been overwhelmed during the last few months. 
^ " Historical Association Leaflets," No. 31, pp. 6-7. 



38 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

An initial difficulty consists in the elusive character 
of rumour. The most positive and brazen-faced 
rumour retires into the background and shrinks to 
modest dimensions when approached by the spirit of 
scientific examination ; and the cross-questionmg 
hardly begins before the lying jade takes to her heels 
and seeks the cover of truth. Rumour accordingly 
takes the form of flying words, and shuns expression 
in the letter that remains ; and it is well, if we can, to 
begin with a rumour that has got committed to print 
and cannot escape. A good example will be found, 
not in a halfpenny newspaper, but set out in the dig- 
nity and circumstance of a monthly re^dew for De- 
cember, over a familiar but pseudonymous signa- 
ture : — ^ 

" In the early hours of August 2nd," Ave are told, 
" Prince Louis issued to our Grand Fleet, assembled 
off Spithead, the order enjoining them not to disperse, 
but to proceed in full strength to the North Sea." 
That memorable order Avas deliberately published the 
next morning in the Sunday papers, Avhen Admiral 
A^on Ingenohl, duly apprised by Avireless of the British 
move, returned hurriedly Avith the High Seas Fleet 
from the Norwegian Fiords to \A^ilhelmshaven. But 
for the inglorious hesitancy of our Cabinet at this 
critical juncture, this timely action by our First Sea 
Lord might have led to a general engagement Avith 
the intercepted German Fleet in circumstances most 
favourable to our OAvn. Which engagement, need I 
remark, Avould have spared not only Sir John Jellicoe 

iThe " Fortnightly Review," Dec, l9l4, p. 1028. 
2 The two orders were quite distinct and were given at different 
dates, the first on 2C July, and the second on 29 July. 



HUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 39 

and his valiant Tars, but the British people, their 
present anxious and unceasing vigil ! But no ; Teu- 
tonic Sittlichkeit was to prevail for yet another, and, 
from our Navy's standpoint, irretrievable sixty hours. 
For, by delaying by just this period the inevitable 
declaration of war, the shirkers in our Cabinet robbed 
the British Admiralty of its one chance of clinching 
matters without vexatious delay. Still, Prince Louis, 
on his own initiative, had destroyed the major portion 
of the hopes built by the German Admiralty upon 
securing the naval predominance of the Triple Alliance 
in the Middle Sea." 

Now, there are various ways of approaching a 
rumour of this description. It might be denied on 
the grounds of moral, political, or constitutional im- 
probability. It might be argued that, if Prince Louis 
of Battenberg was in the habit of giving orders on his 
own initiative designed to lead to an act of war, he 
fully deserved relegation to that limbo to which he 
was consigned by another and equally veracious 
rumour. It might be contended that to attack the 
German fleet before Germany had violated the neu- 
trality of Belgium, or even declared war on France 
and Russia, would have been more consonant with 
Teutonic Sittlichkeit than to refrain ; and it might be 
shown that such an act of aggression would have 
bound Italy, under the terms of the Triple Alliance, 
to side with her allies, would have deprived Great 
Britain of her moral justification based on German 
violation of Belgian neutrality, and would assuredly 
have divided the British mind with regard to the war. 
My point is that these methods are all more or less 
inconclusive, and end in argumentation, while the 
method of historical science is final in its results. 



40 THt^ COMMONWEALTH AT WAU 

The first requisite in historical investigation is, as 
Michelet says, dater finement, and the first aid for 
historical students is some proper guide to chronology 
like Nicolas's " Handbook ". But for our present 
purpose Whitaker's " Almanack," or even a pocket 
diary for 1914, is sufficient. A reference to it will 
show that 2 August, the date of the alleged order, was 
not a Saturday at all, although the writer's corrobora- 
tive detail about publication " next morning in the 
Sunday papers " indicates that he attached some im- 
portance to the circumstance. If the writer meant 
the 2nd, his story about the Sunday papers is moon- 
shine ; if he meant the 1st, he thinks Great Britain 
should have attacked Germany before Germany de- 
clared war on Russia, and at the very moment when 
Austria showed signs of coming to terms. As a 
matter of fact there was no Grand Fleet at Spithead, 
or anywhere near it, on either the 1st or the 2nd of 
August. I happened to be in full view of Spithead 
from 31 July for a fortnight onwards, and there was 
no Grand Fleet in sight whatever. The writer has 
not merely neglected to look at a calendar ; he has 
also failed to consult the official news in the news- 
papers. The King held a review at Spithead on 
Saturday, 18 July ; the following week the Fleet re- 
moved to Portland. Early on Friday, the 24th, the 
terms of Austria's ultimatum to Serbia were com- 
municated to the Cabinet. On that day Mr. Winston 
Churchill, on his own initiative, as we learn from the 
" French Yellow Book," ^ ordered the Fleet at Port- 

1 "The Times " edition, p. Q5. This is not correct. The order 
was not given until 26 July after a conversation over the telephone 
between Mr. Churchill and Prince Louis ; and the French attach^ 



RVMOUn AND msTOmCAL SCIENCE tK WaU 41 

land not to disperse for manoeuvre leave ; on Monday, 
the 27th, the Cabinet confirmed his action and deter- 
mined to publish the news, while Sir Edward Grey, 
also on Monday, pointed out its significance in dis- 
patches to Petrograd and Vienna.^ Finally, it may 
be added, the German Fleet had already been ordered 
to return from the Norwegian fiords on 26 July.^ 

When, after four or five months for reflection and 
examination, a canard hke this can find its way into 
a high-class monthly review, we can hardly affect 
surprise at the monstrous legends which passed from 
mouth to mouth in August and September. It is, 
of course, easy to laugh to-day at the myth of the 
Russian troops ; but it will always remain a fact of 
serious historical import that probably nine out of 
every ten persons who heard it, believed it, though 
such a belief must have been impossible to anyone 
who had received a sound training in historical 
method, and had troubled to apply that method 
to the rumour. But here we encounter the difficulty 
of dealing with the word that is only spoken. The 
rumour, as I heard it, spoke of four Russian army 
corps, or even a quarter of a million troops, being 
conveyed through England ; and nothing I could say 
would convince my listeners of the utter impossibility 
of the story. But since then the believers have 
modified their transports, and reduced the numbers 
in which they believed to a modest few thousand. 

derived from Mr, Churchill's words an exaggei'ated impression of 
his share in the order. See letter from Prince Louis, 19 August^ 
1915. 

1 "British White Paper," Nos. 47, 48. 

2 "French Yellow Book/' pp. 6O-61. 



42 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

That, I may remark, was not the legend wliich gave 
such comfort in secret in August : then the force was 
to be one which should stop the terrific rush of the 
Germans through Belgium, or turn the tide of in- 
vasion from Paris, for which purpose a few thousand 
Russians would have been quite ineffective. It was 
the hope of salvation thereby that gave the Russian 
rumour its enormous vogue, which would never have 
been achieved by the news of the transport of mere 
details. 

There was nothing, of course, impossible in the 
transport via Archangel of a few Russian regiments, 
and no amount of historical science would have en- 
abled anyone to disprove a rumour to that effect. 
But the rumour, as it was current during the last 
week of August and the first week of September, was 
one which the barest familiarity with the elements of 
historical method should have enabled the student to 
confute. Again, there are various ways of approach- 
ing its intrinsic improbability on general grounds. 
Stress might be laid on the futility of landing troops 
in England on their way fi'om Archangel to Belgium 
or France, and thus incurring the delay and expense 
of disembarkation, transport by rail, and re-embarka- 
tion. The ubiquity of their presence might also have 
been urged ; rumours of their having been seen in the 
most impossible places were just as positive as rumours 
that they had been landed at Leith and re-embarked 
at Southampton. Or, it might have been asked how 
Russia could have succeeded in mobilizing army corps 
more rapidly at Archangel, with its single rail, than 
upon the frontiers of Poland and Galicia, and how she 
could have been persuaded to dispatch across the sea 



RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN Vl^AR 43 

troops urgently needed to meet the Austrian offensive 
on Lublin and the German menace to Warsaw. But 
the allegation of probabilities only leads to argument, 
and has no effect upon minds untrained to balance 
them ; and again, it is more effective to rely on 
positive facts. 

The two fundamental conditions in historical 
achievement are, of course, time and space ; and it 
is essential to examine these with care. The falsity 
of the Russian rumour was obvious from the time of 
its appearance. Given as many months as it allowed 
weeks, the rumour might have been true. But it was 
current within little more than three weeks after the 
outbreak of war ; and by no existing means could four 
Russian army corps — let alone a quarter of a million 
men — have been transported from Archangel to Eng- 
land within that period. We have to consider the 
speed of the transports, and the distance to be traversed. 
People who glibly talk about transport commonly 
think of ocean greyhounds doing their twenty knots or 
more an hour. But these are few and the speed of 
a convoy is the speed of its slowest vessel, which 
is nearer ten than twenty knots. The Canadian 
contingent took nineteen days from Montreal 
to Plymouth, a distance of about 3000 miles. 
From Archangel to Leith is half as much, and 
ten days is the very shortest period within which 
troops could have been seen in England after em- 
barkation at Archangel. But there was the voyage 
to, as well as from. Archangel. No one imagines 
that a fleet of transports was conveniently waiting at 
Archangel when the war broke out, and the time 
required must thus be doubled. But even that is 



U THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

not enough. The transports would have had to be 
collected in England before they could sail for Arch- 
angel, and the collection of such a fleet from widely 
distant ports would itself have been a matter of 
weeks. Moreover, we wanted every transport we 
could collect for more immediate purposes, for the 
transport of our own Expeditionary Force across the 
Channel, to fetch our contingents from India, Au- 
straha, Canada, and New Zealand. As it was, the 
embarkation of the Indian troops was delayed a few 
days for lack of transport, and the Canadians did 
not arrive till ten weeks after the war had com- 
menced. 

The unlimited faith in the carrying capacity of the 
British mercantile navy, which the rumour assumed, 
was almost touching in its childlike simplicity. Of 
course, given time, the task was feasible. We trans- 
ported a quarter of a million men to South Africa 
during the Boer war ; but it was a matter of many 
months, and every transport was used again and again. 
The Russian rumour left no time for more than a 
single voyage per ship, and thus implied an almost 
infinite number of available transports, or an infinitely 
elastic capacity on the part of each. But it is well, 
before one talks about the possibilities of transport or 
the chances of invasion, to know something about 
the means available ; and most people discuss these 
matters in an airy way, as though army corps could 
fly with their guns, ammunition, food, and equipment 
on their backs, or as though a single transport were 
sufficient for a whole division. Now, an ocean liner 
of 20,000 tons carries as a rule a complement of about 
3000 souls, including passengers and crew. In time 



RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 45 

of war, troops are no doubt more tightly packed ; but 
on the other hand, their impedimenta, comprising 
guns, gun-carriages, horses, tents, etc., average out at 
more per head than the trunks that even an American 
lady carries across the Atlantic ; and I believe that 
each man requires about ten tons in shipping. The 
manager of the L.S.W.R. spoke of one huge liner 
taking 3000 troops at once across the channel ; but 
that was clearly an exception, and perhaps it did 
not include artillery. To transport five army corps 
would thus require a hundred vessels of 20,000 tons 
apiece. But there are only eight vessels of that ton- 
nage in the British mercantile marine, and the average 
tonnage of a transport is nearer 5,000 than 20,000. 
It may comfort some minds to learn from a table 
published by the Board of Trade, that the total 
amount of German mercantile shipping not accounted 
for as captured, detained, or held up in British or 
neutral ports, camiot much exceed a million and a half 
tons, and that this would not suffice for the transport 
of four German army corps to English shores. It was, 
in fact, properly regarded as a remarkable and, indeed, 
unparalleled achievement for Great Britain to have 
mobilized and transported to the front an Expedition- 
ary Force within the period during which Russia is 
supposed, according to the rumour, to have mobilized 
at Archangel, and we are supposed to have embarked 
there, transported to Leith, disembarked, transported 
to Southampton, re-embarked, and landed in France 
an army tv*dce or three times the size. Yet South- 
ampton possesses almost unrivalled facilities as a port, 
and is fed by a whole network of railways, while 
Archangel has but a single line, and its wharves can- 



46 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

not be approached by ocean-going vessels.^ There 
should have been no need for the Press Bureau to 
pubHsh a denial of the story, even after the Russians 
had been " seen " in Belgium by a special correspond- 
ent. 

Now, these facts, or most of them, were easily 
ascertainable from the most ordinary sources ; a good 
atlas and Whitaker's "Almanack," coupled with 
average intelligence and a scientific habit of mind, 
were quite sufficient equipment wherewdth to resist 
these onslaughts of rumour. And yet one was pes- 
tered for weeks with all sorts of stories, told with a 
solemnity tempered with anger at the least symptom 
of doubt, and affirmed by all sorts and conditions of 
men and women. Some had seen trains' pass in the 
night, and knew they were packed with Russians be- 
cause the blinds were down and the travellers could 
not be seen. Others had seen them by day, and knew 
the troops were Russian, " because they had their 
cossacks on ". One retired Colonel told me he knew 
tlie rumour was true, because this use of Russian 
troops was a stroke of strategical genius of which 
none but Lord Kitchener was capable. A lady alleged 
a letter from Russia which threw some light on the 
matter : tlie letter had not been written in answer to 
any suggestion or inquiry, but merely in the ordinary 
course of correspondence, and it told how a party of 
English friends had been down to Archangel to see 
off the Russian troops for Scotland ! 

The rumour seems ridiculous now, but it was not 
quite an innocuous matter, and if true would have 
made, on my mind at least, a very uncomfortable 

^ See "The Times," Russian Supplement for January, p. 10. 



RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 47 

impression. One kind of harm it did was indicated by 
a passage referring to it in the " Frankfurter Zeitung ". 
The " Zeitung " did not, indeed, beheve the report ; 
but it remarked that if it was true, it proved up to 
the hilt what Germans beheved all along, namely, that 
England and Russia had been concerting measures 
for war long before war broke out ; for it was obvious 
that an operation of that magnitude could not have 
been carried out without long preparation. Another 
kind of harm is suggested by the theory that the 
rumour was started by the Germans themselves, with 
a view to blunting the stimulus to recruiting. In any 
case, it would be a disastrous condition of things if 
the Western Allies had, over and above the splendid 
service Russia is rendering to the common cause in 
the East, to rely also on Russian troops for success in 
France and Belgium. In such an event there would 
be little chance of hearing any voice but that of 
Russia in the ultimate settlement of Europe. 

The real cause, not of the rumour itself, but of its 
portentous vogue, I take to have been psychological. 
The first hint I heard myself about Russians in the 
West was from a newsvendor who, when selling me 
an evening paper containing news of the German 
occupation of Namur, remarked, "That's where we 
want some of those Russians ". Russian troops had 
been overrunning East Prussia and Gahcia ; in the 
West nothing seemed able to resist the Germans. 
The wish was father to the thought ; and the intensity 
of our desire for some means to stop the Germans set 
thousands of brains to unconscious work on sugges- 
tion. There may have been some slight foundation 
of fact for some of the details, such as Russian reser- 



4.8 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

vists from America or the British Isles returning to 
join the colours. But the surprising phenomena were 
the spread of the rumour like wildfire, the passion 
with which it was held to be true, and the mfinity of 
corroborative detail with which it was substantiated ; 
and these were the outcome of desire, which is the 
enemy of truth. They recall to one's mmd Prof. 
Bury's dictum to the effect that, in so far as we desire 
our investigation to lead to a particular conclusion, 
we are not good historians ; for the desire to see cer- 
tain things will lead us to see them, and to ignore the 
facts which stand in the way. 

What, under these circumstances, is the value to 
be attached to the word of men and women ? The 
question often cropped up during the prevalence of 
the Russian rumour in a somewhat offensive form ; 
and on occasion one could hardly venture to suggest 
a doubt without being met vn\h the irate query : " Do 

you think I am a liar ? " or " Do you think that , 

who told me he had seen the Russians, is a liar ? " and 
the softest of answers was insufficient to turn away 
wrath, unless one perjured oneself and professed a 
belief in what one knew to be false. There was one 
redeeming point about the matter : no one had seen 
the Russians himself ; it was always a friend or a 
friend's friend, and one could escape without any re- 
flection upon one's interlocutor except in so far as his 
intelligence was concerned. The fact is that, while 
truthfulness is commonly treated as a moral quality 
which all may possess, it is also a matter of intellect. 
The desire to tell the truth is a moral quality ; the 
capacity to discern the truth is quite a different thing, 
which no amount of good intention can produce. 



RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 49 

The retailers of the Russian rumour were not in the 
least dishonest ; but their capacity to discern the truth 
was limited, and their desire to tell it was overborne 
by their desire for comforting news and their wish to 
share it with others. 

Less amiable motives have led to the propagation 
of rumour. A proHfic source is the sense of superior- 
ity which some people derive from the possession of 
real or imaginary information, to which less favoured 
individuals have no access ^, and most of us have suf- 
fered, I imagine, from persons with cousins at the 
front, or in the Admiralty or War Office, whence 
they derive an inexhaustible supply of priceless secret 
information, about which their certainty is in inverse 
ratio to the inherent probability of the news, or of its 
having been communicated to them. My own advice 
would be to disbelieve it all ; for, so far as my ex- 
perience goes, English gentlemen, who are in a posi- 
tion to possess confidential information, are in the 
habit of treating it as confidential ; and the more com- 
municative I find an informant, the less I trust the 
sources of his information. In any case, such con- 
fidences are more likely to be the source than the 
corrective of rumour, and it is far safer to rely upon 
the scientific use of knowledge, which is public pro- 
perty, than upon the credulous repetition of private 
tittle-tattle. 

The November rumours about emplacements at 
Willesden and elsewhere for heavy German siege 
artillery, provide another illustration of the value of 
a little definite knowledge properly applied. Those 
tales were an echo of the famous story about concrete 
platforms at Maubeuge, a story which was told and 



50 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

conclusively exploded three years before the war 
broke oiit.^ Now, we m England might be excused 
for ignorance of the exposure of that specific story ; 
and my point is to illustrate the value of public in- 
formation which enables us to appreciate the futility, 
not of one specific legend, but of all the brood. The 
simple criterion of all these concrete platform legends 
is the fact that the German 11 •2-inch gun, which 
made havoc of the French and Belgian forts, is not 
fired from a concrete platform at all, but from its own 
carriage, which has its wheels fitted with steel plates 
for the purpose, and can be discharged on any maca- 
damized road.^ Nor is there any fortification in Lon- 
don that would require the attention of an 11 •2-inch 
gun, and there was not the least necessity for nervous 
citizens to discover six feet of concrete for German 
guns in the three inches beneath the asphalt of scores 
of tennis courts. If our tremulous and indignant 
neighbours could divert some of their imagination 
from their parochial surroundings, and devote it to 
the task of realizing the unseen effect of British naval 
power, there would be less rumour, less inclination to 
panic, and a truer insight into the realities of the war. 
I am not sure that I have been preaching com- 
fortable doctrine, or pointing out a broad and easy 
way for the teachers and students of history and his- 
torical methods. But I hope I may have said some- 
thing to indicate the value and necessity of historical 
education. The war has produced some sudden con- 
versions ; and educational authorities have developed 

1 See "The New Statesman," 14 Nov., 1914, 

2 See Major-General O'Callaghan's letters in "The Times," 
13 and 19 Nov., 1914. 



RUMOUR AND HISTORICAL SCIENCE IN WAR 51 

an extemporary sense of the importance of historical 
study as a means of understanding current events. 
But it is easier to improvise armies than it is to im- 
provise an historical sense ; and that sense, indispens- 
able to the understanding of the issues of the war, 
will be even more essential to the settlement of peace. 
History is no mean subject, and no mere antiquarian 
study to satisfy the curiosity of a few self- chosen 
votaries. It provides the opportunity for, and re- 
quires, severe scientific training ; and it has a moral 
value as well. If we allow our desires to dictate our 
beliefs, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 



111. 

THE LENGTH OF WARS/ 

We are most of us deeply interested in the probable 
duration of the war, but there is no Delphic oracle to 
respond to our inquiries. More than twelve months 
ago Lord Kitchener ventured to express in the House 
of Lords his conviction that the war would be long ; 
and subsequent events have tended to establish his 
reputation as a military prophet. But, if Pilate was 
jesting when he asked what is truth and stayed not 
for an answer, we need not jest when we ask what is 
length in war, and we should willingly wait for a 
response. It is a defect in adjectives that they mean 
little except in comparison ; and Lord Kitchener did 
not explain his standard of reference when he said that 
the war would be long. Some wars have been very 
long and some very short ; with which category was 
Lord Kitchener mentally comparing the present war, 
when he expressed his opinion as to its length — with 
the six weeks' war between Prussia and Austria in 
18G6, or with the Hundred Years' War between 
England and France ? If the former was in his mind, 
the truth of his statement was self-evident, for when 
it was made the war had already lasted more than six 
weeks. If he was thinking of the Hundred Years' 
War, he was clearly indulging in paradox. 

1 "The Times " Literary Supplement, 14 October, 1915, 

52 



THE LENGTH OF WARS 53 

That comparison may be dismissed from^ our minds ; 
but there is no standard duration for wars, and no rule 
by which to measure their length. Everything that 
distinguishes man from the physical world belongs to 
the realm of art and not to that of science, and war, 
as we know it, is a human invention. There is nothing 
normal about the duration of war, how^ever much in- 
ternational law and ethics may have sought to reduce 
its practice to a common measure of humanity ; and 
history provides no generalization on the subject. It 
is impossible to deduce from recorded facts any defini- 
tion of length or brevity in war ; and when we say 
that the war will be long or short, we express very 
little unless we explain the standard we have in our 
mind. One man may, indeed, mean exactly the same 
thing when he says the war will be long as another 
means when he says it will be short ; we have to guess 
at the meaning of each by inference from the standard 
we think that he has in his mind. 

Lord Kitchener, no doubt, had in his mind the 
length of recent wars ; and of recent times wars have 
tended to be shorter than they were. The Austro- 
Prussian War of 1866 was an extreme case ; but each 
of the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 was a matter of 
weeks. So were the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885 
and the Turco-Greek War of 1897. These Balkan 
conflicts were the wars of the little peoples, but the 
giants were almost as expeditious. The Crimean 
War, in which three great (and one gi'owing) European 
Powers were involved, was a matter of little more 
than a year ; ten weeks sufficed for the War of Italian 
Liberation in 1859 ; and the Franco-Prussian War 
was practically decided in the month between Saar- 



54 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

bruck on 2 August and Sedan on 2 September, 
although Paris stood out till the end of January. 
Other wars of the last half- century were hardly less 
brief ; the world seemed bent on showing that there 
was, after all, a norm for the duration of wars, and 
that it was about a year or eighteen months. These 
were the limits of the multitudinous wars of 1848-9, 
of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, of the Chino- 
Japanese War of 1894, of the Spanish- American War 
of 1898, of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, and 
of the Turco-Italian AVar of 1911-12. The Boer War 
of 1899-1902 ran for two years and a half, but there 
was some justification for the Lord Chancellor who 
described its later phases as " a sort of war ". Of that 
sort was inuch of the fighting in the Greek AVar of 
Liberation, which nominally lasted from 1821 to 1827, 
and can be easily explained as an exception to the 
normal brevity of nineteenth-century wars. 

The greatest of all the wars between 1815 and 1914 
does not, however, conform to the nineteenth-century 
rule of brevity. The American Civil AVar lasted for 
four years ; and we should guess that between it and 
the others Lord Kitchener would draw his Une of 
distinction between a war that is long and a war that 
is short. If we had to interpret his meaning in terms 
more precise than the bare statement that the war 
would be long, we should infer his opinion to be that 
the war would be long, because its duration will ap- 
proach nearer to that of the American Civil AA^ar than 
to that of the dozen other wars of the century of which 
soldiers have some recollection or knowledge. The 
war, in his opinion, is likely to come nearer to four 
years than to one in duration ; and we might hazard 



THE LENGTH OF WARS 55 

the guess that the three years' term fixed for enlistment 
expressed his interpretation of a " long war ". His 
prophecy would still hold good if the war were brought 
to an end in the autumn of 1916, for by that time it 
will have been longer than any great war in Europe 
since the fall of Napoleon. 

Such a duration would not make it long in the 
eyes of the student of history ; to him, if it lasted four 
years, it would still be short, for the brevity of war is 
but a modern phenomenon. Even the nineteenth 
century began with nearly fourteen years of a war 
which had already lasted for eight. The preceding 
century, which closed with the year of Marengo and 
Hohenlinden and the capture of Malta, had opened 
with the twelve years' war of the Spanish Succession, 
and during its course had witnessed the eight years' 
war of the Austrian Succession, the seven years' war 
for the existence of Prussia and of the British Empire, 
and the seven years' war for American Independence. 
In both the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries 
there were more years of war than of peace, and 
some of the wars were of portentous duration. 
There was the Thirty Years' War of Religion in 
Germany, and the French Wars of Religion were 
intermittent for a similar period, while the Dutch 
War of Independence lasted, save for the Twelve 
Years' Truce, from 1568 to 1648. Back in the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was fought 
the Hundred Years' War between England and 
France ; and one need not be an optimist to think 
that the present war will be short compared with 
that century of conflict. 

Wars have grown shorter because of their sharp- 



56 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

ness. They might still last for generations if they 
were still, as they were in the JNliddle Ages, little 
more than the summer outings of the landed gentry 
and their retainers. They continued to be lengthy 
so long as armies were small and consisted of profes- 
sional soldiers. It was conscription, introduced during 
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, that abridged 
the earlier wars of generations into the nineteenth 
century wars of weeks and months. For armies 
must be fed and clothed and equipped with muni- 
tions, even when they are unpaid ; and the greater 
the proportion of citizens a nation sends to fight the 
shorter the time it can maintain them in the field. 
France under Napoleon appears to be an exception, 
but it is so only on the surface. By herself France 
would soon have succumbed ; Napoleon's later armies, 
like those of Imperial Rome, were largely composed 
of drafts from subject peoples and subservient allies, 
and he made others provide his equipment. Indeed, 
it was this necessity which compelled him to be 
always extending the frontiers of France until he had 
trebled its size. If England had adopted conscription 
in 1793, she might conceivably have ended the war in 
a couple of years ; assuredly she would not have held 
out for twenty-two. No other Power was able to 
offer more than an intermittent resistance to France. 
Even Russia was only at war with Napoleon in 1799, 
1805-7, and 1812-15. Conscription is the method by 
wliich nations have raised the stakes in the gamble of 
war ; the play is higher, but the game is sooner won 
or lost. Continental Powers have, however, no option 
in the matter ; if one adopts conscription the others 
must also, otherwise they will be knocked out without 



THE LENGTH OF WARS 57 

the chance of playing a cautious and longer game. 
An island State supreme at sea is in a happier case ; 
it can, if it likes, put all its men into the field. But if 
it does, it must win in a Umited time ; an effort that 
costs £4,000,000 a day cannot last for tAventy-two 
years. 

So far England has, as a rule, been in the long 
wars of history and out of the short ones. There are, 
of course, exceptions ; some of our naval wars have 
been short like those with the Dutch ; and our in- 
terventions in the religious wars of France and Ger- 
many were brief, ineffective, and inglorious. But we 
endured a hundred years' war with France, and we 
fought throughout the twelve years' war of the Spanish 
Succession, nine years of war between 1739 and 1748, 
five years from 1756 to 1761, seven years from 1775 
to 1782, and twenty-two years from 1793 to 1815. 
The length of our wars may be attributed to our 
national habits of being unprepared when they start, 
sticking to them when we have begun, and economiz- 
ing our effort during their progress, all of which habits 
depend upon our command of the sea. For, as Bacon 
remarks, " thus mucli is certain, that he that com- 
mands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as 
much and as Httle of the war as he wiU. Whereas 
those that be strongest by land are many times, never- 
theless, in great straits." 

Prussia, on the other hand, has always preferred a 
policy of short wars and quick returns ; and, for a 
nation which believes in the virtue of war, the periods 
of her indulgence have been remarkably brief. Her 
main anxiety during the Thirty Years' War was to 
keep aloof; and, although the Great Elector fought 



58 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

more than one war, none of them lasted thi-ee years. 
The father of Frederick the Great fought but one in- 
glorious campaign during a reign of twenty-seven 
years ; and his more famous son, who provoked the 
War of the Austrian Succession by seizing Silesia in 
1740, was the first to escape its toils. He made a 
treaty with Austria in October, 1741, broke it in 
November, made peace again in 1742, re-entered the 
war in 1744, and abandoned it in 1745. He fought, 
it is true, for seven years between 1756 and 1763, but 
it was through no choice of his that Prussia then waged 
the longest war in which she was ever in^^olved ; it 
was only England and some fortunate Russian ac- 
cidents that saved her from total destruction. For 
the rest of his long reign Frederick remained at al- 
most unbroken peace. The same features character- 
ized Prussian action during the Revolutionary and 
Napoleonic period ; one of the first to challenge France 
by force of arms, Prussia was also the first to make 
peace three years later, in 1795 ; and for ten years 
she watched, as a careless spectator, the growth of 
Napoleon's power. She even stood aside, bribed by 
the offer of Hanover, while Austerhtz was fought, and 
met with a richly-deserved retribution at Jena and 
Auerstadt in 1806. For six years she groaned under 
Napoleon's heel, and she sent her troops to assist in 
the ruin of Russia. The disaster of JVIoscow hardly 
gave her courage to rise against her master, and her 
Government was jockeyed into independent action by 
Colonel Yorck at Tauroggen. The A¥ar of Liberation 
was over in fifteen months, but even that brief period 
was longer than any other war which Prussia fought 
in the nineteenth century. 



THE LENGTH OF WARS 59 

It was in consonance with her past that Prussia 
laid her plans in 1914 for a war that should be brief. 
It is in consonance with ours that we should be sur- 
prised by the advent of war, and only by slow degi'ees 
work up to the requisite standard of effort for success. 
We do not as a nation prepare for aggressive war, 
because, unlike the Prussians, we do not regard war 
as legitimate means for pushing our national business ; 
and it never entered our heads that defence might de- 
mand the dispatch of two million troops across the sea. 
But the lack of precise calculation is not altogether a 
bad thing. He is a foolish optimist who thinks that 
a war can be won by a definite number of troops or 
in any given time ; for, in the words which Thucy- 
dides puts in the mouth of the Corinthian envoys to 
Sparta, " war, least of all things, proceeds according 
to programme ". He is a sane optimist who deduces 
from English history the conviction that, being per- 
suaded of the justice of our cause, we shall make the 
effort required for success, however great it may be 
and however long it may last. 

Meanwhile, however brief the war may be, com- 
pared with our wars in the past, the present will seem 
to be intolerably tedious, partly because we are accus- 
tomed to live at a faster pace than our slower forbears, 
and partly because we forget. Distance is foreshort- 
ened in time as well as in space : and, as we look back 
on the victorious peaks in our history, we lose sight of 
the intervening valleys of despond. y\^e remember 
Horace Walpole's merry quip in 1759: "We are 
forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for 
fear of missing one " ; and Wellington's Peninsular 
War looks to our backward gaze like a glorious 



60 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

pageant leading on from Talavera to Salamanca, from 
Salamanca to A^ittoria, and thence to the cro^Miing 
mercy at Waterloo. But we fail to realize the years 
over which the victories were spread, or the disap- 
pointments and defeats which interrupted processional 
glory. Wellington had to retreat almost as often as 
he advanced ; in the wintei of 1812 the French must 
have seemed as firmly established in Spain as the Ger- 
mans appear to be in Belgium, and in August, 1759, 
to be as impregnably based on Quebec as the Turks 
to-day on GaUipoli. Eleven days before the storming 
of the Heights of Abraham, Wolfe wrote to Pitt : 
" The obstacles we have met \at\\ in the operations 
of the campaign are much greater than we had reason 
to expect or could foresee ; not so much from the 
number of the enemy (though superior to us) as fi'om 
the natural strength of the country ". To Pitt's col- 
league he wrote that his health was " entirely ruined 
without the consolation of doing any considerable ser- 
vice to the State, and without any prospect of it " ; 
while the French Governor in his dispatches would 
hardly give the British a week longer to maintain the 
siege. There were those in 1759 as well as in 1915 who 
said we were beaten because we had not yet succeeded. 
Yet Wolfe was not an incapable soldier, nor Pitt an 
incompetent Minister of War. 

We were surprised when the war began ; we are 
surprised that it lasts so long ; and we shall be sur- 
prised wlien it ends. A few of the wise (and more of 
the wicked) had an inkling that the war was at hand ; 
they were not surprised by its advent, and some may 
not be surprised when it ceases. But if they know 
the hour of peace, like wise men they will not tell. 
There is on record a bet made in April, 1815, after 



THE LENGTH OF WARS 6l 

Napoleon's return from Elba ; it was to the effect 
that by New Year's Day, 1816, the allies would 
have lost to Napoleon more territory than they had 
won. Within two months of the bet, Napoleon's 
only footing was on board H.M.S. Bellerophon. It 
would be easy to make much more foolish forecasts 
to-day. The knowledge of subsequent events, said 
Froude, has spoilt the writing of history ; and ignor- 
ance of the future is the very stuff of which daily (and 
weekly) journalism is made. Some day, however, a 
fortuitous forecast of peace will prove correct, and the 
author will plume himself on his prophetic soul, with 
as much justification as those who are provmg their 
prevision of war with Germany in 1914 by their pro- 
phecies of war with Russia in 1904, and with France 
at the time of Fashoda. One prophesies not accord- 
ing to knowledge, but according to temperament. 

History, however, suggests some limits for the 
guesswork of vaticination, though they are somewhat 
elastic. One historian has committed himself to the 
view that the war will last ten years ; another wrote 
last spring that it was more Ukely to last eight years 
than eight months ; while a thu-d thought a year ago 
that it would end in the winter of 1915-16. The first 
was a mediasvalist, the second was almost a profes- 
sional pessimist, and the third, impressed by the 
causes which shortened war in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, paid too little heed to the "progress," which 
tends to neutralize their effect. The end of the war 
would be well in sight but for the growth of medical 
science and the example of Florence Nightingale ; for 
between them our doctors and nurses enable some 
sixty per cent of the wounded to return to the firing 
line. The war would also have ended ere now but 



62 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

for the increased efficiency of human production, 
which enables one man to create enough sustenance 
for two, and thus makes it possible for half mankind 
to concentrate on war. Unless man's control of his 
natural instincts keeps better pace with his growing 
command of material forces, there might come a time 
when the majority would be permanently engaged in 
war while the minority provided the means. 

The war will be further prolonged by the difficulty 
of making peace. It cannot be ended, like normal 
wars between nation and nation, by a mere trans- 
fer of territory or payment of an indemnity. For 
this is Europe's civil war, and civil wars are long. 
The American Civil War was the longest great war 
since 1815, and the causes which made it an excep- 
tion to the rule of brevity operate in the present con- 
flict. It is not merely a doctrine in arms, as Burke 
described the French Revolution, that we are fight- 
ing, but the doctrine of arms, the creed of Treitschke 
and Bernhardi that the arbitrament of war is not bar- 
barous but the climax of political science ; and that 
is not a cause with which peace can be made. It has 
to be crushed, or its adherents converted ; and the 
alternatives are convertible terms, for argument fails 
to persuade the believer in force. But belief in force 
is a feeble creed, if a creed at all ; it evokes no loyalty 
and crumbles to dust in time of trouble. Even a 
German does not believe in war for the sake of war, 
but only because he thinks war pays ; and his zeal for 
tlie war will speedily cool when once he is convinced 
tliat he cannot make others pay his colossal and 
rapidly mounting bill. It is safer to say that the 
war will end with a crash in Germany tlian to predict 
the date. 



IV. 

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS/ 

No cry has been more popular in Germany, since the 
retreat of her High Seas Fleet to its harbours and the 
failure of her submarine campaign, than that for the 
freedom of the seas ; and recently Sir Edward Grey 
has, amid some protest, admitted that the question is 
one that might receive attention after the war, and in 
connexion with other proposals for limiting the scope 
of military and naval operations. The phrase is puzz- 
ling on account of its ambiguity ; and we may assume 
that when Sir Edward Grey used it he meant some- 
thing different from what the Germans have claimed. 
They have regarded the cry as one of their trump 
cards in their efforts to secure American sympathy, 
or rather to provoke American antipathy to Great 
Britain ; and the recent American Note ^ on the subject 
has been hailed in Germany as proof of fundamental 
identity between German and American interests in, 
and notions of, the freedom of the seas. 

It wiU, however, require a good deal of inflation 
to distend the molehiU of American discontent into 
the mountain of German pretension. The American 

^ " The Times " Literary Supplement, 18 November, 1915. 

2 On British contraband and blockade policy, published on 7 

November. 

63 



64 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

case is a civil action to abate such inconveniences asa 
state of war imposes upon a remarkably flourishing 
commerce between the United States on the one hand 
and Germany and neutrals, from whom Germany de- 
rives much of her supplies, on the other. It takes 
the form of process at common law, and assumes that 
the letter should be respected without reference to any 
change in military circumstance. Thus, agreements 
and precedents dating from pre-submarine periods are 
cited to debar British warships from conveying mer- 
chant vessels into port for the purposes of search. 
The rule that a blockade must be " impartially " ap- 
plied is interpreted as meaning that it must be applied 
to all neutrals with equal effectiveness ; and the stop- 
page of American vessels to Germany is considered 
harsh because Swedish vessels camiot be stopped in 
the Baltic. On such a plea, if Great Britain were 
at war with Turkey, and Russia and the United 
States were neutral, Britain would be precluded from 
deahng with American trade to Turkey in the Medi- 
terranean because it could not deal with Russian trade 
to Turkey in the Black Sea. Complaint is also made 
of the time taken in searching American ships, a delay 
largely due to the ingenuity of American shippers in 
concealing contraband ; and generally it is assumed 
that the impossibility of making a blockade completely 
effective should preclude the attempt to make it as 
effective as possible. 

These are, compared with the issues of this war, 
trivial matters, capable of amicable argument and 
accommodation. Their only connexion with the 
" freedom of the seas " which Germany wants is that 
in them Germany hopes to find the grit with which 



THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 65 

to impede the machinery of British naval power ; and 
Herr Dernburg, during his residence in the United 
States, devoted not a httle of his powers of persuasion 
to the task of showing that British " navahsm " is a 
greater menace to the world's liberties than German 
miUtarism. It may be worth while inquiring what he 
meant by British navalism and its antithesis, the free- 
dom of the seas. 

Herr Dernburg has helped us to define that issue 
by a speech he made in New York last January ; ^ and 
speaking in that classic land of pacifism, where they 
convert their eagles into harbingers of peace, he con- 
trived to represent British navalism as the one great 
obstacle to the world's peace, and the " freedom of 
the seas " as its one desideratum. 

" The whole fight and all the fight [he said] is on 
one side for the absolute dominion of the seven seas ; 
on the other for a free sea — the traditional mare 
liherum. A free sea will mean the cessation of the 
danger of war and the stopping of world wars. The 
sea should be free to all. It belongs to no one nation 
in particular — neither to the British, nor to the Ger- 
mans, nor to the Americans. The rights of nations 
cease with the territorial line of three miles from low 
tide. Any dominion exercised beyond that fine is a 
breach and an infringement of the rights of others." 

So far we have a statement of fact, which is true in 
a sense Herr Dernburg did not intend, foUowed by a 
flight of pacific optimism and a string of platitudes. 
The fight is reaUy for " the traditional mare liberum^'' 
a phrase given vogue by Grotius in 1609 and made 
applicable during his lifetime by the defeat of the 

1 9 January, 1915. 
5 



66 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Spanish Armada, which, as Queen EHzabeth said, 
made the sea free to all men. The " traditional uiare 
liberum'' dates, in fact, from the establishment of 
British naval power ; would it survive the transference 
of that power to Germany ? The fate of Belgium and 
of Luxemburg illustrates German ideas of other 
people's freedom ; and the incidents of the " Lusitania," 
the " Ai'abic," and the '* Ancona " do not suggest that, 
if she had the opportunity, she would apply a different 
definition to the sea. We may thus agree with Herr 
Dernburg's opening sentence ; but we camiot agree 
^\^th liis optimistic mference that freedom of the seas 
means the cessation of war. What had the freedom 
of the seas to do with Germany's war on Denmark in 
1864, on Austria in 1866, and on France in 1870, or 
with Austria's ultimatum to Serbia and the Kaiser's 
to Russia m 1914 ? Can Herr Dernburg's meaning 
be that, but for British naval power, no State would 
venture to challenge the liberties which Germany 
takes on land ? 

/ His following platitudes are, however, unimpeach- 
able. The sea should be free to all, and it is so in 

V times of peace. It belongs to no nation in particular, 
and Britain's sovereignty, like that of every other 
Power, is limited to her territorial waters. On the 
high seas she enjoys no right and exercises no juris- 
diction that is not exercised by every other State. 
Where, then, is the dominion to which the Germans 
demur ? What is their grievance, and how would 
they liberate the sea if they won the victory ? Of all 
the peoples that go down to the sea in ships the Ger- 
mans have the least cause to complain ; for upon the 
freedom of the sea, enjoyed during British supremacy. 



THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 67 

they built up a vast fabric of oceanic trade and domestic 
prosperity. Their great liners plied the ocean without 
let or hindrance ; they freely used British ports and 
territorial waters, and drew not a little profit from 
British traffic and passengers. Germany has, indeed, 
enjoyed a freedom of trade which she has herself 
denied to Great Britain. 

And she has never paid the price of admiralty. 
Long before she set sail on the ocean, other peoples 
— Portuguese, Spaniards, Genoese, Dutch, French- 
men, and Danes — had explored the waters of the globe 
and charted its hidden shoals and rocks, discovering 
passages liere and passages there, and revealing the 
dangers of the deep. In the days of the Merchant 
Adventurers and chartered companies, mariners sailed 
with their lives in their hands, and the risks that the 
trader ran made heavy demands on his profits. They 
cleared the waters of pirates, and made the high seas 
a safe and famiHar highway. Germany contributed 
nothmg to the science of navigation, to the art of 
naval construction, to the discovery of new worlds, 
or to the pacification of the ocean. She has entered 
into the mheritance of other men's labour and sacrifice 
without paying toll or fee. No German Sir Hum- 
phrey Gilbert and no German Sir John J'ranklin 
braved the Atlantic in 60-ton barques or left his bones 
to bleach amid Arctic snow. The German has ever 
been the pedlar and not the pioneer of civilization, the 
follower of the camp and not the leader of the xaiv. 
He has bred neither conquistadores nor Pilgrim 
Fathers ; and in these latter days, while the eagles of 
enterprise — Peary, Amundsen, Scott — winged their 
flight to the poles, the vultures swooped down upon 



68 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Belgium. Does Hen* Dernburg desire the sea to be 
free for similar German liberties ? He wants it, like 
Belgium, to be neutralized. 

" To prevent wars in the future [he continued] we 
must establish that the free seas shall be plied ex- 
clusively by the merchant marine of all nations. 
Within their territory people have tlie right to take 
such measures as they deem necessary for their defence, 
but the sending of troops and war machines into the 
territory of others or into neutralized parts of the 
world must be declared a casits belli. ... If that be 
done, the world as it is divided now would come to 
permanent peace." 

Surely there is no optimism like that of a militarist 
converted by a voyage across the Atlantic into an 
apostle of permanent peace. In 1839 Belgium was 
declared by all the Great Powers of Europe — including 
Prussia — to be a " neutralized part of the world," and 
the violation of its neutrality was made a casus belli. 
But where is the permanent peace, and with what 
assurance can those who broke that pact of neutrality 
appeal for the neutralization of the sea as a guarantee ? 
We get, however, a notion of what Germany means 
and wants by a " neutral " sea. She has explained 
that Luxemburg, as distinct from Belgium, observed 
a true neutrality towards Germany by yielding access 
to German armies in their attack on France. Clearly 
a " neutral " land is one which facilitates a German 
offensive, and a *' neutral " sea is one which protects 
German armies during their progress ! 

For the point of this proposed prohibition of the 
transport of troops and war machines across the sea is 
obviously to preclude the intervention of Britain in 



THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 69 

Europe. German armies may ride roughshod over 
Belgium or France, but the freedom of the seas dis- 
appears if British troops are sent to the rescue. The 
real ??iare liberum is one which secures to German 
armies complete Uberty of action on land ; and the 
real German grievance against British dominion is that 
it protects other continents from the interpretation of 
neutrality which Germany has dictated to Belgium 
and Luxemburg. There is much to be said for the 
limitation of armaments, and pacifism is no doubt an 
attractive dream ; but surely no one but a German 
would set out to commend to the world a pacifism 
confined to the seas, and seriously propose to limit 
British fleets to territorial waters while leaving Ger- 
man armies to roam at liberty over the land. We 
should, most of us, like to abolish war ; but German 
simplicity reaches its climax in the grave suggestion 
that war should be excluded from the sphere of Ger- 
many's weakness, and left uncontrolled in the sphere 
of her strength. Hen* Dernburg does, indeed, admit 
that the sending of troops " into the territory of others 
must be declared a casus belli,'' and he thereby justifies 
Serbia, Belgium, France, and Russia ; but how is that' 
declaration to bring the world to permanent peace ? 

Post-prandial oratory, indeed, seldom reached a 
sublimer height of absurdity than in Herr Dernburg's 
plan for the neutralization of the seas ; and we should 
not have expected a proposal which would destroy 
America's hold over the PhiHppines and the Panama 
Canal to commend itself to an American audience. 
Suppose, too, that war broke out between Great 
Britain and Russia, Russia could invade India over- 
land, while Britain would be forbidden to defend it 



10 TtiE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

by forces sent over sea. Or, in case of war between 
Great Britain and the United States, Canada would 
be left at the mercy of an American invasion without 
the possibility of assistance from the Mother Country. 
The invasions would, no doubt, be casus belli, accord- 
ing to Herr Dernburg's ingenious scheme ; but what 
is the use of a legal casus belli if you are debarred by a 
neutral sea from waging the war to which you are en- 
titled by law ? So far as Anglo- German relations are 
concerned, the proposal would have its points, if only 
we could put more trust in German respect for a 
neutral sea than in her respect for a neutral Belgium ; 
for Great Britain and all her Dominions would be safe 
from German attack. But do we gather that Herr 
Dernburg forswears Germany's right to recover Tsing- 
tau or German South- West Africa ? And for what 
has Germany built a High Seas Fleet if Herr Dern- 
burg is going to confine it to territorial waters ? He 
surely does not want an international law to confirm 
the accomplished deeds of the British Navy ? His 
proposal is rather, we fear, the periphrasis of a plan to 
abolish sea-power because Germany does not possess 
it, and to exclude Great Britain from a voice in the 
world's affairs — a simple device, in fact, to get rid of 
two inconvenient islands. Great Britain and Japan ! 

But, if we are out for fi-eedom, and if Herr Dern- 
burg will not begin by fi-eeing the land, we might well 
begin at the other end of the scale, which is not the 
sea, but the air. For if the sea should be free, surely 
the air should be freer still ; and we are surprised that 
this neophyte of peace did not suggest the neutrality 
of the air, or at least of the air which lies over the 
open sea. Why not propose the prohibition of the 



THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS 71 

transit of war machines through the air, which belongs 
to no particular nation, neither to the British, nor to 
the Germans, nor to the Americans ? The air is not 
yet the link of anyone's empire, and we might be pre- 
pared to meet in a friendly spmt any such effort to 
limit the horrors of war. Is it that Herr Dernburg 
sets more store by Zeppelins than by Dreadnoughts, 
and again cannot bring himself to suggest the neutrali- 
zation of any sphere in which Germany hopes to 
triumph ? Naval power is, however, immoral in Ger- 
man eyes, because in time of war it acts in restraint of 
trade, and in particular enables Great Britain to inter- 
fere with Germany's food supplies. The notion that 
a belligerent has a moral right to receive all the food 
he requires did not occur to the Germans during the 
siege of Paris ; and in the present war the Central 
Empires have prevented the West of Europe fi'om 
importing Russian harvests more effectively than 
Great Britain has stopped Germany's supplies. Again, 
it is only on sea that control is an infringement of the 
rights of others ; on land it is quite legitimate. Ger- 
many's moral code is a very simple one : whatever she 
can do is right, whatever she cannot is wrong. Ger- 
many's power on land is her natural liberty, but the 
freedom of the seas consists in the restraint of her foes. 
The German proposal is also a thinly- veiled scheme 
to dispose of the British Empire by international law. 
Germany knows well enough that the sea is the spinal 
cord of the British realms, and that without control of 
their means of communication these realms would be- 
come the disjecta membra of an Empire. Each colony 
and dominion would be thrown back on its own re- 
sources, and left at the mercy of any powerful neigh-. 



72 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

bour, or of any oversea enemy with inadequate respect 
for scraps of paper. Sea-power was an indispensable 
preliminary to the growth of the British Empire, and 
the Spanish Armada had to be defeated before England 
could found a single permanent colony. The German 
Empire rests on a different basis ; it was created by 
Bismarck and maintained for twenty years mthout a 
fleet at all ; and Herr Dernburg's proposal itself is a 
proof that sea-power is not a German necessity ; other- 
wise he would not suggest its elimination. The Ger- 
man High Seas Fleet is a whim of the Kaiser's, an 
ostentatious luxury — unless it is designed to estabhsh 
a German dominion which Herr Dernburg pronounces 
incompatible wdth the freedom of the seas. To 
neutraUze the ocean would have the same effect upon 
the British Empire that a neutralization of the frontiers 
of Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria, and the prohibition 
of the transport of troops and war machines across 
them, would have upon Germany. Herr Dernburg's 
project of freedom is a virtual invitation to inter- 
national lawyers to accomplisli that extinction of the 
British Empire which the German Navy has failed to 
achieve. 

But the Kaiser, we are told, only demands " a 
place in the sun ". It is an ingenious phrase which 
vividly illustrates the Prussian mind. We are apt to 
regard the British Isles as a very considerable place in 
the sun, but Germany, with a much greater area and 
population, is not, it appears, a place in the sun. Its 
people sit in darkness and only see sunshine in realms 
that belong to others. A place in the sun is not the 
object of their aspirations, for that they already pos- 
sess. Their object is control of. the sunshine, and tiiat 



THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS IS 

is their meaning of empire. They fail to comprehend 
the British Empire, and think that Great Britain 
dominates its dominions. . . .^ The British realms 
are free nationahties, and their freedom depends upon 
the freedom of the seas, which would disappear with 
a German victory. Nor are the British realms alone 
concerned ; the century which has elapsed since Tra- 
falgar has been marked by the climax of British naval 
supremacy. It has also been marked by the greatest 
growth of nationality all the world over : behind 
British navalism has sheltered the Monroe Doctrine, 
and the peoples whom that doctrine nursed into 
independence ; and but for British sea-power there 
might have been no independent Greece or Italy. 
Sea-power has been a trust on behalf of liberty vested 
in Great Britain, and the trustees will not permit the 
Kaiser to pervert it to German purposes. 

Germany herself is one of its greatest beneficiaries 
in time of peace, and her complaint is that she cannot 
do on sea what she does on land in time of war. But 
the nation that makes war debars itself by its own act 
from the freedom which it enjoys in peace. There is 
no freedom without law, and the freedom of the seas 
in time of war depends upon the extent of inter- 
national law and the respect that is paid to its behests. 
No one has done more than the German, by the mouth 
of his prophets and the deeds of his warriors on sea 
and on land, to limit the scope, hamper the operation, 
and impugn the validity of international law. Ger- 
many would almost seem to regard it as valid only so 
far as it is convenient to herself or inconvenient to her 

^ I have omitted here a few sentences which are expanded on 
pp. 81-8. 



U THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

enemies ; and she will plead with more chance of suc- 
cess at the bar of public opinion for a legal freedom 
of the seas when she has put off her shining armour 
and her belief in her mailed fist and puts her trust in 
the forces of reason and hght. If she believes in the 
reign of law and the rule of freedom on the seas, let 
her show her faith by good works in establishing law 
and Hberty over the land she has won by the sword. 



V. 

THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS.^ 

Towards the end of June there appeared in the 
" Kolnische Zeitung " an article by Prof. Schroer, 
an erudite student of EngUsh philology, on the eiFect 
of the war upon the relations between Great Britain 
and her colonies. It was an extended comment, some- 
what on the hnes of a lament that was published in 
" Der Tag " in April. " We expected," said " Der 
Tag," " that British India would rise when the first 
shot was fired in Europe, but in reality thousands of 
Indians came to fight with the British against us. 
We anticipated that the whole British Empire would 
be torn in pieces, but the colonies appear to be closer 
than ever united with the Mother Country. We ex- 
pected a triumphant rebellion in South Africa, yet it 
turned out nothing but a failure. We expected 
trouble in Ireland, but instead she sent her best 
soldiers against us. Those who led us into all these 
mistakes and miscalculations have laid upon them- 
selves a heavy responsibility." 

From the point of view of the genesis of the 
war, it would be interesting to discover by whom and 
with what object the German people were thus mis- 
led and deceived ; but Prof. Schroer's purpose is to 

^ Written in July, 1915 ; reprinted from *' The Yale Review," 

January, 1916. 

75 



?6 TitE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

explain the behaviour of Great Britain's allies and 
colonies. So irrational and paradoxical does their 
attitude appear to the German political theorists that 
Herr Schroer is driven back on a supernatural inter- 
pretation, and he discovers the secret in English 
witchcraft ! So bewitching are our beaux yeiioc, or 
rather our " evil eye," that our rebels fall on our neck, 
and our rivals, forgetting the crimes of perfidious 
Albion, rush to its assistance. In this war it was a 
case of Great Britain rushing to the assistance of Bel- 
gium, France, and Russia rather than the reverse ; 
but we may pass over that trifle in our search for a 
more rational account of the phenomena than that 
which commends itself to the professor. We are 
not in England quite so convinced of our powers of 
fascination, whether for good or evil, and we suspect 
that our allies, and perhaps even our colonies, are 
fighting by our side, not so much because they love 
us the more as because they like Germany less. 

In this paper I am not so much concerned with 
Great Britain's allies as with her colonies — their rela- 
tions to the causes of the war and their probable rela- 
tion to its settlement. I use the term " colonies " 
without prejudice : it is unpopular in the great domi- 
nions of the British Crown because it fails to express 
their undoubted national status ; and a far better term 
would be " realms ". The United States has set the 
example of a plurality in unity, and the " British 
Realms " might be singular in number without being 
singular in the sphere of political terminology. It 
represents a better tradition and a truer conception 
of facts than " British Empire ". Nor is it without 
reluctance that I write even of probabilities in con- 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 77 

nexion with the settlement after the war. In a 
British university, which attaches great importance to 
poUtical science, I recently ventured to propound the 
question, " Of what value is political science to politi- 
cal prophecy ? " The question was regarded as some- 
thing of a slur upon the scientific character of the 
study of politics, but the answers were pitched in a 
modestly minor key. It is clear that anyone, who 
forms or commits to print a forecast of the effects of 
this war upon the correlation of British realms, runs 
risks which angels avoid. 

So far as the causes of the war are concerned the 
problem is more simple, though this simpHfication does 
not help to dispel the bewilderment of our German 
critics. For this war had no colonial causes. Unlike 
the Seven Years' War of the eighteenth century and 
the Boer War of 1899, it had no roots in a great 
rivalry in other contments than Europe ; and Cana- 
dians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, 
and Indians have not trooped to the colours because 
they were menaced within their borders. Great 
Britain has during the last half century had colonial 
difficulties with France, Russia, and the United States, 
and some of them have threatened to bring war within 
measurable distance. But she has had none such 
with Germany. The partition of Africa in 1890 was 
effected without any serious friction, and the friction 
that arose at Algeciras and Agadir had no reference 
to British colonies. When war broke out in August, 
1914, there was hardly a cloud on the horizon of 
British dominions across the sea. The war broke out 
over questions that were purely European, and Great 
Britain intervened because she could not afford to 



78 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

remain neutral while Germany swept away Belgian 
neutrality and proceeded to conquer France. What, 
it may be asked, was there here to stir Indian princes, 
Boer statesmen, or the miners and farmers of Canada 
and Australia ? 

There were, no doubt, particular causes of offence 
which tended to provide a common bond of antipathy 
to the ubiquitous German. Indian princes, with a 
lineage older than that of the Hohenzollerns, and with 
a culture more humane, had during the Boxer expedi- 
tion been termed and treated as " niggers " ; and more 
recently the German Crown Prince had, on a visit to 
India, behaved in such a way to his fellow-guests and 
hosts that only his character as a guest saved him 
from public resentment. Australians, too, looked 
with no friendly eye on their neighbours in Kaiser 
AVilhelm's Land and the Bismarck Archipelago. 
But there was nothing in this to make war. Neither 
Canadians nor Australians were fond of the Japanese, 
and it needed a good deal of provocation to range 
Australians and Japanese, Canadians and Hindus in a 
common cause against the Kaiser. It has often been 
remarked that our primitive ancestors felt no need to 
state and define their customs in written codes until 
they were brought uito contact with the habits and 
thoughts of strange nations. That contact revealed 
to their minds the contrast between them and the 
strangers, and also made them appreciate their own 
common inheritance. In some such way the pushing 
emissaries of Kultiir brought home to the British 
realms the fact that behind all their idiosyncrasies of 
constitution, policy, and circumstance there was a com- 
munity of spirit which only grew conscious by contrast, 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 79 

and can best be described in terms of contradiction. It 
would be vainglorious to say that the British realms 
are everything which the German Empire is not, but 
it is a sufficient source of satisfaction that they are 
little what that Empire is. The violation of Belgium's 
neutrality and the wanton attack upon France lit up 
by a flash the gulf between British and German 
politics, and in the inevitable clash the British realms 
were united. None but a few extremists in Canada 
and South Africa protested that those dominions 
should observe a " national " neutrality while the 
Empire was at war. Herzog, Delarey, Beyers, and 
De Wet cherished a blind but not incomprehensible 
passion for revenge in South Africa ; but the handful 
of French nationalists in Canada, who wanted to seize 
the particular occasion, when the British Empire and 
France were at one, to estabhsh their nationality by 
standing aloof, present a more complex psychological 
problem. 

This community of spirit was fortified by a com- 
munity of interest. There were no particular colonial 
interests in the war, or causes for colonial interven- 
tion ; but there was a common colonial cause which 
is best described as naval. It left the Dominions no 
choice. They might or they might not approve 
Great Britain's scruples about scraps of paper or her 
refusal to regard with idle indifference the German 
spoliation of France. In point of fact they felt less 
hesitation than some of the slow-witted folk at home. 
But whether or no they approved of British inter- 
vention, there could be no doubt of their action when 
once the die was cast. For the event must decide 
between British and German naval supremacy, and 



80 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

upon that issue depended the liberty and the exist- 
ence of each and all of the British realms.^ 

That fact helps us to understand the whole-hearted 
co-operation of the British realms in this European 
war. Mahan's words have not fallen on deaf ears in 
British dominions. No compulsion, no suggestion 
even, was required from Downing Street to evoke 
lavish offers of service from every quarter. Had 
Great Britain been compelled to rely on compulsion, 
she would have been powerless. She could not have 
extracted by force a man or a dollar from Canada, 
South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, or India. 
Help was forthcoming because every dominion and 
colony knew that upon the supremacy of the British 
Na^y and the maintenance of its communications 
by sea depended the very existence of the British 
Empire, and the freedom of each of its realms to 
develop its o^v\\ unfettered future. That is why the 
old vaticinations about the disruption of the Empire 
have proved so signally false ; that is why, even amid 
the horrors and venom of war, we can feel indebted 
to Germany. The greater the threat to British naval 
power, the stronger the bond of unity between British 
dominions. To the Kaiser and von Tirpitz we owe 
not a little of the modern growth of British imperial 
sentiment ; and the disappearance of every danger 
would test the unity of the British realms more 
severely than any German aggi'ession. They are pro- 
tected, but not held together by force ; and nothing 
binds closer the bonds of consent than the threat of 
forcible dissolution. 

1 I have omitted here some paragraphs on the freedom of the 
seas covermg the came ground as the preceding article. 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 81 

That is the secret of British witchcraft and Ger- 
man bewilderment. The votaries of the gospel of 
might are bhnd to the strength of affection, and 
German publicists and philosophers have frankly con- 
fessed their complete inability to understand the 
British Empire. How we could afford, within five 
years of the conclusion of a bitter war, to allow the 
Boers far more liberty than Germany could after 
forty grant to Alsace-Lorraine, how we could govern 
300,000,000 in India with smaller forces than Ger- 
many could govern 4,000,000 across the Rhine, were 
problems beyond the scope of their philosophy. 
Some even saw in that contrast a proof of British 
impotence, thinking no doubt that force is the only 
foundation of power, and ignoring the fact that 
military strength is a common symptom of moral 
weakness. The misunderstanding was naturally most 
comprehensive in the militarist mind ; but it is not 
confined to militarists or even to Germany. It is not, 
indeed, easy to explain the British Empire to Britons 
themselves ; and the difficulty arises from a conserva- 
tive cUnging to obsolete \dews and a failure to grasp 
the significance of modern developments. Some 
people still think of the British Empire as unchanged 
since the days of George the Third ; and as late as 
1840, the Duke of Wellington affirmed that its two 
fundamental principles — the responsibility of colonial 
executives to colonial parliaments, and imperial unity 
— were incompatible. The term " empire " is itself 
unhappy and incorrect, for nothing less Uke an empire 
than the British realms could well be conceived. 
Empire impHes absolute rule and militarist methods ; 
it is a scientific description of the Kaiser's Germany, 



82 TtlE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

but it has no relevance to the realms of George the 
Fifth. As " emperor " he possesses no legal or con- 
stitutional powers whatever, and " empu-e " defines 
neither his nor any other Briton's authority. In the 
British Isles and colonies he is simply king, and the 
Act which made Queen Victoria Empress of India 
conferred but a high-sounding title. 

The singular word obscures a vital diversity. In 
a popular but shallow book, which attempted be- 
fore the war to transplant the teachings of Treitschke 
to British soil, it was laid down that the purpose of the 
British Empire is to give every one of its citizens an 
English mind. Nothing could be more fatuous or 
more false. If it were true, there might be a differ- 
ence in degree, but there would be none in essence, 
between the British and the German Empires, and 
British might stand in the dock with German Kultur. 
For the fundamental objection to German Kultur 
is not its barbarity, but its uniformity and its insol- 
ence, its belief in a single superior type, and its claim 
to force that type upon others ; while the essence of 
the British Empire is its heterogeneity, its lack of 
system, and the mutual forbearance of its component 
parts. Possibly that is why it angers as well as puzzles 
the German mind. To Potsdam, if not to Vienna, 
the British Empire must seem a loose and ramshackle 
affair, with no logical claim to existence in a world of 
scientific bureaucracy. Its function is not to impose 
an English mind on Irishmen, Scots, and Welshmen, 
Boers, Moslems, and Hindus ; and we no more expect 
to turn Australians into Englishmen than to convert 
them into French-Canadians. Its function is to en- 
able them all to develop a mind of their own. AVe 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 83 

believed, indeed, in uniformity in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, just as v^^e tried an irresponsible 
Government — like the Kaiser's — under the Stuarts, 
and sought to colonize Ireland with the same methods 
and results as Germany is seeking to-day to settle 
her Polish provinces. But we — or most of us — learnt 
better in time ; and Germany, too, will learn better 
when she is rid of her twentieth-century despots with 
their seventeenth-century notions of government. 
It is the German ex-Chancellor himself who quotes 
with approval another German statesman to the effect 
that the Germans are " political asses " ; and Bern- 
hardi expresses the mind of the General Staff when 
he says that no people are less fitted to govern them- 
selves than the Germans. 

Here lies another reason for colonial co-operation 
in the war. All self-governing communities are vitally 
interested in resistance to this German political 
atavism, just as English Liberalism was concerned 
in the successful resistance of the American colonies 
to coercion by George the Third. Had he succeeded 
in that attempt, he would without doubt have also 
succeeded in riveting personal rule on England ; and 
if the Kaiser wins this war, junkerdom will be supreme 
in Germany and in Europe for at least a generation, 
and countries outside Europe will either have to fight 
or submit to a dictation to which they have not been 
accustomed, and from which the British Navy has so 
far afforded protection. For, after all, the Moni'oe 
Doctrine is not even a scrap of paper, and its value 
depends to-day and to-morrow either upon the British 
Navy or upon an American Navy which is willing to 
fight and able to conquer the German fleet. British 



84 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

colonies cannot, of course, rely upon the United States 
Navy ; they have no option but to rely on the British 
Empire if they wish to avoid the Procrustean bed of 
German Kultur. "Every state," writes Treitschke, 
" must have the right to merge into one the nation- 
alities contained within itself" That is the funda- 
mental distinction between the two Empires. British 
naval supremacy does not mean the merging of any 
nationality. It does not subject British colonies or 
anyone else to dominion. It is their guarantee of 
freedom, and it is by no chance collocation of events 
that the century of complete British naval supremacy 
has witnessed the greatest growth of nationalities that 
the world has ever seen. 

Dominion, in fact, is not the characteristic of the 
British Empire, but rather the absence of it. The 
German foible is to see dominion everywhere and to 
want to grasp it. Great Britain does not own Canada 
or Australia or South Africa ; they are owned by the 
people who live there. Even the waste lands in 
British colonies were long ago recognized as the pro- 
perty of the colony and not of the Mother Country ; 
and there is not an acre of land outside the British 
Isles from which the British Government derives a 
farthing of revenue. The colonies do, indeed, help to 
support the British Navy, and they have sent large 
contingents to its armies in this war ; but all is done 
by fi-ee gift and not by imposition. The colonies are 
free to govern themselves and even to tax British im- 
ports and exclude British subjects from their borders. 
Only thus could the British Empire exist, because it 
is based on freedom. The denial of responsible self- 
government to the British realms, as the Hohenzol- 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 85 

lerns have denied it to the German people, would have 
broken up the Empire long ago. The Kaiser envies 
and wishes to emulate the British realms ; but he de- 
clines to make that self-sacrifice of will, without which 
there cannot be political salvation ; and he does not 
see that it has only been through that sacrifice, through 
the recognition of the right of each British realm to 
govern itself by means of its own responsible minis- 
ters, that the British Empire maintains its unity and 
strength. He wills the end but not the means ; he 
craves for British world-power, but repudiates the con- 
ditions of its existence. Germans attribute British 
success to scandalous good luck. Had they possessed 
all Great Britain's initial advantages, they would have 
thrown them all away through their will-to-power 
and their lust for absolute dominion. We believe in 
no power that is not based on service and guarded by 
responsibility ; they base power on prerogative and 
guard it by lese-mc0este. Government by consent is 
the secret of empire which Germany will be taught by 
the present war. It is a simple matter of recognizing 
the hberties of others, and purging one's soul of the 
poison that any man, dynasty, or nation has the right 
to govern another against its will. 

There is no particular British witchcraft in this lore 
of statesmanship, though we cannot forbear admira- 
tion of its working when we behold Boer generals, who 
were fighting us in the field fifteen years ago, turning 
Germans out of South Africa, and then volunteering 
to serve with British armies in Europe. They had 
their choice and they made it, because they had had 
experience of German and British government ; and 
not for their lives would they substitute one for the 



86 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

other. For one is dominion and the other is hberty. 
Even on the high seas British " dominion " has made 
and maintained a mare liberum. In peace, there is no 
discrimination, and ships of all nations frequent the 
ocean with equal security. In war, Great Britain 
does not sink neutral vessels or take toll of neutral 
lives. She merely exercises the belligerent rights 
which all powers have used in turn and are expressly 
sanctioned by international consent. Britannia rules 
the waves only in patriotic poems, and in the sense 
that she is stronger than any other naval power ; her 
" dominion " consists in the free course of international 
law and in the exercise of rights which are common to 
all. In peace she claims no rights and does no acts 
of sovereignty ; but when the peace is broken she 
cannot defend herself and others if she waives the 
rights, and reframs from the acts, of war. 

The cause she conceives herself to be defending is 
the liberty of little nations and the freedom of British 
realms. The liberty of Belgium and Serbia is an issue 
which few can mistake ; but the freedom of the British 
realms is a stumbling-block to other than German in- 
tellects. An American, who has lived much among 
us, proclaims that he has great respect for the English 
people but none for the British Empire ; and another 
writer in a work on " Alexander Hamilton " avers 
that " a democracy pretending to a sovereignty over 
other democracies is either a phantom or the most in- 
tolerable of all oppressions ". The general truth of 
this aphorism we do not dispute, but it has no relev- 
ance to the British realms, which do not consist of 
democracy pretending to a sovereignty over other 
democracies. Canada is no more ruled by Mr. 
Asquith than England is by Sir Robert Borden, and 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 87 

Britons never by any chance speak of colonists as 
their subjects. They are our fellow-subjects, or 
rather, our partners in the sovereignty we exercise 
and enjoy. That sovereignty is not the dominion of 
one over other British realms any more than the 
sovereignty of the United States is the dominion of 
Connecticut over Texas. The concern is a joint-stock 
enterprise, and the Crown is the capital of the firm, 
John Bull & Co. John Bull is, indeed, the senior 
partner, but the other realms are partners too. Each 
has a call on the resources of the company, and 
each has behind it the reserves of the British Empire. 
The partnership is none the less real because it is un- 
defined and because the partners have not written out 
and proclaimed to the world their articles of agree- 
ment. A written, inflexible constitution is only re- 
quired when the tradition and habit of co-operation 
are weak ; and the unity of the British realms is one 
of the spirit and not of the letter, a bond of blood and 
sympathy and not a parchment deed. Its terms are 
nowhere stated, but they are everywhere understood. 
The war may provoke in impatient minds attempts 
at further definition. Some, who fail to discern the 
spirit except through material manifestations, are ever 
pressing for the crystallization of British unity in paper 
Acts of Union or Federation. But while the British 
realms are eager for co-operation, they will not tolerate 
uniformity, and nothing would tend more surely 
towards disintegration than efforts to impose a con- 
stitution. The essential features in their government 
have grown and not been made ; and our cabinet 
systems and prime ministers were never created by 
Acts of Parhament. Even responsible government 
itself was not conferred by statute ; it is a mere 



88 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

practice adopted step by step for convenience, and 
adapted to the changing mood of circumstance ; and 
the fundamentals of our constitutions are riot their 
laws, but their customs. It is not by formal federation 
that the British realms will gather the fi'uits of their 
common sacrifice, or express the common aims to 
which the war has added impulse. The " councils " of 
the Empire will continue to resemble those mediccval 
English " counsels " rather than the formal bodies into 
which they have been converted in imagination by 
mistranslation of the ambiguous Latin concilia of the 
chroniclers. The imperial conference may develop 
into the imperial cabinet ; but it will not become a 
federal council, and like its prototypes throughout the 
Empire it will remain unknown to the statute law of 
the British realms. It will become a custom of the 
constitution long before it becomes an Act of Parlia- 
ment. 

The material, and still more the moral, value of 
the assistance rendered by his junior partners to John 
Bull constitutes, however, an increase of their stake 
in the joint concern, and involves a corresponding in- 
crease of weight in the counsels of the Empire and 
the world. This consideration will affect some of the 
details in the settlement. Australia will certainly not 
be content to relinquish the German colonies in the 
Pacific conquered by the arms of the Commonwealth, 
nor South Africa tliose subdued by the Union. From 
her own particular point of view Great Britain might 
have preferred an indemnity to any extension of 
territory ; but regard for the peace of her partners 
will probably compel her to shoulder the financial 
burden of the war without relief from the compensa- 
tion which Germany will have to pay for her sins 



THE WAR AND THE BRITISH REALMS 89 

against Belgium and civilization. But these gains 
in the Pacific and in Africa will be trifling compared 
with the fi'uits of earlier victories and the colossal 
sacrifice of men and treasure in this war. Australia 
and New Zealand will have nothing material to show 
for the thousands of gallant Hves they have lost at 
the Dardanelles, and Canada will have no territorial 
recompense for her splendid sacrifice in Flanders. If 
there are to be material gains in the reduction of arma- 
ments, the destruction of militarism, and the promised 
reign of peace, the British realms will share them on 
no more than equal terms with the rest of the world. 
War might have paid a victorious Germany ; it 
will not pay a triumphant British Empire, and we are 
content that it should not. It was not for profit that 
the British realms interposed. In a sense we had, in a 
sense we had not counted the cost which Herr Beth- 
mann HoUweg thought would deter us. In either 
case the cost was not the material point. The British 
realms stood in August, 1914, where Luther stood 
at the Diet of Worms — they could do no other than 
they did. They could not afford to fall short of the 
standard set by Belgium and her heroic King, and 
ignobly ignore his appeal against might. Nor, in the 
face of that example, are they anxious to boast of 
their virtue ; compared with Belgium's temptation to 
peace and her sacrifice for the sake of her honour, 
theu' own temptations and sufferings have been slight. 
" Above all the nations stands humanity " is a famous 
legend in a great American university ; and the merit 
of the British realms consists merely in this : they set 
enough store on humanity to strike a blow in its de- 
fence, and in its cause they were not too proud to fight. 



VI. 

BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST 
IN WAR.^ 

There are British disciples of Prussian Realpolitik 
who are only happy in the conviction that their country 
has been actuated by no motive higher than that of 
mere self-interest ; and some have worked themselves 
into what seems to them a state of virtuous indignation 
over the hypocrisy of pretending that we entered the 
war to vindicate Belgian neutrality or the liberties of 
little nations, or indeed for any other purpose than 
that of self-defence. If we make war, it is for strictly 
practical reasons, and if we keep at peace, it is because 
peace is the first of British interests. To make war 
for the sake of an idea or an abstract principle would 
be treason to British common sense, and a betrayal of 
that aptitude for business upon which the British 
people likes to pride itself. We were not really 
annoyed when Napoleon called us a nation of shop- 
keepers ; we should have been much more annoyed if 
he had called us a nation of idealists and if we had 
thought there was any truth in the charge. There is 
nothing, in fact, about which John Bull is more shame- 
faced than his idealism. He will confess to dogged- 
ness, courage, good-humoured tolerance, and even 

^ " The Times " Literary Supplement, 13 Januaiy, 1916. 

90 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 91 

generosity ; but he would rather write himself down 
an ass than admit that he has ideals. He feels that 
idealism would turn his bluff red countenance into a 
grimace. 

So we tell one another that in fighting this war 
we are merely practising the noble art of self-defence, 
and our nearest approach to rhapsody is to talk of 
hearth and home. Yet the defence of self and home 
is a totally inadequate explanation of the part which 
the British realms are playing in this war, or of the 
motives which lead them to play it. The Briton, for 
one thing, has assumed that his self includes every 
subject of the King and that his home extends to the 
uttermost bounds of the British Empire, an expansion 
of home and self that required a certain amount of 
idealism and imagination. John Wesley took the 
whole world for his parish, John Bull has taken the 
whole Empire for his home. In the early days of the 
national service movement it was based on the need 
of a citizen army to protect these shores from invasion 
in case the first naval line of defence broke down ; and 
the Territorial Force was sharply differentiated from 
the Regular Army with the same idea. The course 
of the war so far has justified all that was said by the 
Blue Water school, and yet we are raising our fourth 
million men, while the original distinction between 
the Territorial and Expeditionary Forces has practi- 
cally been obliterated. Commissions in the Territorial 
Force are being restricted to officers volunteering for 
foreign service, and Territorial regiments have covered 
themselves with glory in France and Flanders, and 
are guarding Egypt and India. The British idea of 
home has infected the Dominions as well. Canadians 



92 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

have fought with heroism on the Western Front, and 
Austrahans and New Zealanders have stamped their 
initials so indehbly on the GallipoU Peninsula that 
most people imagme Anzac to be a Turkish name for 
a place in the Dardanelles. Yet Canadian and Aus- 
tralian homes were amply protected without this self- 
defence in Flanders and the iEgean ; both the British 
Na\y and the Mom'oe Doctrine barred the path of 
German invasion across the Atlantic, and a German 
conquest of AustraUa was not among the Kaiser's 
dreams. He would have been glad enough to recog- 
nize — and respect — the neutrality of any British realm 
that cared to proclaim it. Not one took advantage of 
the opportunity, for " home " and " self " had been 
expanded and exalted beyond and above the literal 
confines of egotism and locality ; and m the expansion 
of the " ego " there lies the making of the ideal, 
whether it be an empire or the world. 

For even the British Empire has not afforded a 
scope wide enough for the practical idealism of the 
British realms. We talk less of humanity than do 
the Americans ; but American humanity confines 
itself, so far as effective State action is concerned, to 
the American Continent, and a writer in the cun-ent 
number of the " Yale Review " asserts that " the 
United States will never be justified in going to war 
with another well-organized and civilized nation except 
for defence ". British humanity is not limited to a 
single continent, but embraces all ; and Britons would 
not care to restrict their championship of little peoples 
to defending them against attack from foes who were 
not " well organized ". It has been the excellent 
organization of the aggressor that produced the dis- 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 93 

tress of the victim and the need for intervention. But 
this assistance of the weak against the strong is not, 
Hke the trade in munitions, a profitable business, and 
British intervention cannot be explained on the prin- 
ciples of the counting-house. Nor can it be explained 
on wider gi'ounds of self-interest and self-defence. 
We seem to have blundered into an idealism of which, 
so far as it is conscious, we are half-ashamed ; we have 
not written out our Constitution and prefaced it with 
a Declaration of the Rights of Man, and we shall not 
blazon on our banners the principles for which we 
fight. 

Yet we have not really blundered into our ideals 
any more than we blundered into our Empire. We 
talk of blundering simply because the evolution of the 
Empire and its principles was not mapped out in 
Government programmes and effected by a General 
Staff. Not the less on that account, but the more, it 
was a matter of cause and effect. The Empire grew 
when and where it did, because the expansive energy 
of British nationality applied a pressure over most of 
the globe from the sixteenth century onwards, and 
where resistance was weak it was penetrated by British 
influence. There was not much idealism in the pro- 
cess, and the East India Company was out for gain. 
But in the wake of the Companies followed responsible 
British government ; responsibility to subjects at 
home fostered the idea of responsibility to subjects 
abroad ; and the comprehensiveness of that respon- 
sibility for the welfare of all sorts of people in all 
quarters of the globe has given a wider sweep and 
greater depth to British notions of humanity. The 
Empire cannot exclude all continents but one from 



94 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

its outlook, nor, in view of its position in India, re- 
strict its ideas of moi^ale to the impressions made by 
mailed fists. Germany's faults are those of the pai^- 
venu untrained in the responsibilities which attach to 
wealth and power. She is not at home in the society 
of the world, and her international manners betray the 
crudeness of her ideals. 

Great Britain has to be a " man of the world " in 
the better sense of that ambiguous term. No pro- 
vincial attitude is possible, and a national outlook is 
already out of date. It is a matter of ideals as well 
as of interests ; and an organism which has nerves in 
every continent camiot be indifferent to the political 
ideas which prevail in any one of them. Diplomati- 
cally we turn a blind eye to the domestic politics of 
every foreign State ; we do not intervene in them or 
go to war about them. But they are not matters of 
indifference. For one thing, a Government cannot 
in the long run maintain the distinction between a 
domestic Dr. Jekyll and a foreign Mr. Hyde. If it 
rules by coercion at home it will lean to coercion 
abroad ; if it repudiates responsibility to its own 
people, it will not admit responsibility to a Hague 
tribunal ; and the violation of Belgian neutrality, the 
sinking of the " Lusitania," and the execution of Edith 
Cavell spring from the same roots as the Zabern in- 
cident. A German triumph in Europe woidd be a 
blow to responsible government all the world over, 
and temporary German successes have practically sus- 
pended Parliamentary rule in the Balkan Peninsula ; 
the unconstitutional victories of the Greek and Bul- 
garian monarchs were won by German battles in 
Poland and Galicia. Germany stands, in fact, for 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 95 

most of the ideals which the British Empire has re- 
jected, and the war is to test their endurance. We 
can agree with Bernhardi for once when he says that 
the Turk is Germany's natural ally. 

A good deal more than home and self-defence is 
involved in the war, and our shjniess about our ideals 
should not blind us to their existence. It is true that 
there are patriots who began the war proclaiming 
their intention of carrying on " business as usual," 
prolonged it by preventing employees from enlisting, 
and look to the capture of Germany's trade as its 
glorious end. But the war was not made for the sake 
of war-profits, and business is not the lure which takes 
men to the trenches. A spirit moved the dry bones 
of which England seemed full two years ago ; " and 
they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceeding 
great army ". Neither was it the dread of invasion 
that brought England into the war or recruits to her 
standard ; and it is not fear, but indignation, which 
steels her will to fight the war to a finish. The deeds 
that have stirred the English people in this war have 
not been German victories or German threats to 
Enghsh security. No one complained of them when 
they sank the " Good Hope " and the " Monmouth " 
at Coronel, nor even when they torpedoed the 
"Cressy," the " Hogue," the " Aboukir," and the 
" Formidable ". It is the warfare they wage on 
civihans, women, and children by Zeppelins and sub- 
marines, their indifference to suffering, if by its in- 
fliction they can win, and their use of torture as a 
means to victory, that converted peaceful Britons to 
the cause of retribution. The violation of Belgian 
neutrality convinced us that there was abroad in 



96 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Europe a spirit which would violate all the rules 
rather than lose the international game ; and without 
rules international comity is impossible. Ablata jus- 
titia^ quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia ? The 
German disciples of Machiavelli have denied St. 
Augustine's assumption of justice among nations, and 
the task of the AlUes is to show that the State is not 
a corporation of pirates, however boldly the Kaiser's 
Hussars may flaunt their skull and cross-bones. 

The cost of this idealism to the British Empire is 
considerably greater than that of self-defence, and we 
could have secured immunity for hearth and home 
without loss of life and at a lower pecuniary sacrifice 
than a year of this war involves. We are spending 
at an annual rate of something like eighteen hundred 
millions. For that sum we could have built 200 
super-Dreadnoughts and some thousands of cruisers, 
destroyers, and submarines ; and even a victorious 
Germany would have few terrors for an Empire 
guarded by such a force. We could have done almost 
as much by confining our participation in the war to 
the element on which we are supreme, as we did for 
the most part during earlier English conflicts. Three- 
quarters at least of the world-power we exert is due 
to the Navy; three-quarters at least of what we are 
spending now goes to the Army. The novel feature 
of this war, so far as we are concerned, has been the 
raising of two or three million men for service on the 
Continent. It is that decision which involves our 
novel expenditure ; and, next to the declaration of 
war, it was by far the most momentous decision in it. 
Yet it was taken without a word of public discussion. 
It was, in fact, hardly a decision at all, but an uncon- 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 97 

scious process of- assumption, so deep — and buried — 
are the foundations of our idealism. For, assuredly, 
it was not a business proposition, and the ground for 
our action was the tacit conviction that it would be 
intolerable to the British people to look on a Belgium 
and France under the German heel, even though our 
feehngs might be solaced by the conquest of German 
colonies and the cessation of German overseas trade. 

That being so, we have to pay the price for our 
sentiments, and wage war on the principle of a lia- 
bihty that is unhmited, or Umited only by Germany's 
capacity for offence and our AUies' for resistance. 
We cannot restrict our efforts to an equality of sacri- 
fice, allege the inestimable services of our Navy to the 
common cause, or plead in response to demands for 
further assistance that we are already putting into the 
field a greater proportion of our population than 
Russia. We listen in silence while Americans tell 
us that it is their duty to remain neutral but ours to 
do more in the way of intervention, and when even 
an Ally, which is playing a limited part in the war, 
expresses uneasiness at our reluctance to take to con- 
scription. Before the war it was thought by our 
AUies as well as ourselves that an expeditionary force 
of 150,000 men would be ample to redress the balance 
between the rival European groups, even if Italy 
joined the Central Empires. That expeditionary 
force has been multipHed by ten, and it may have to 
be increased by another 50 per cent. We shall send 
our troops quite irrespective of the fact that, if the 
parts were reversed, we should have to repel our in- 
vaders without assistance ; for a Germany that could 

land a conquering army on our shores could assuredly 

7 



98 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

prevent the transport of troops to our rescue. It is 
idle to pretend that all this is for home defence. We 
only repeat that shibboleth because we lack the moral 
courage to avow our idealism and the intellectual 
energy to formulate our principles. We are fighting 
on no principle of nicely-calculated less or more, be- 
cause to the England which thinks and feels, and 
therefore counts in the balance, a German triumph 
would be a veritable abomination of desolation, a 
prevailing of the gates of Hell ; and faith would be 
impossible. We fight in order that we may believe. 
The heaviest price we pay is not in treasure or in 
blood, but in the loss of lesser ideals. La petite 
7)iorale, cest Vennemi de la grande ; national freedom 
was only won by the sacrifice of local and sectional 
liberties ; and we are confronted with the dilemma 
that the liberty of Europe and the world can only be 
gained by jettisoning some of our ancient privileges. 
Some of us seek solace in the persuasion that we 
never possessed them, and that a universal obligation 
to fight anywhere and everywhere has always been 
inherent in English common law, even before there 
was a common law at all. However that may be, 
the idealism which makes us the champion of Euro- 
pean liberties constrains us to abandon the idealism 
consecrated in the liberty of voluntary service.^ But 
it is not without a pang that one thinks of the closing 
of those Rolls of Honour which have been the pride 
of every school and college and university, and almost 
every parish in the kingdom. There will, of course, 
be the same scope as of old for Victoria Crosses and 

^ The Compulsory Military Service Bill was introduced in the 
House of Commons on 5 January." 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 99 

medals and mentions in dispatches ; and we are not 
likely to be reduced to the Spartan modesty of Crom- 
well's Ironsides, which was illustrated in his laconic 
account of Dunbar — "both your chief commanders 
and others in their several places, and soldiers also, 
were actuated with as much courage as ever hath been 
seen in any action since this war. I know they look 
not to be named, and therefore I forbear particulars." 
But the honour which clung to every volunteer, 
whether he was killed by a stray bullet or died in 
hospital at the base, will not attach to the man who 
has no option and owes not his death to his own voli- 
tion. The brave and the others will merge in a 
common confusion, and the glory of individual self- 
sacrifice will have departed from England. 

Its place will be taken by a national sacrifice made 
at the will of the community, and imposed by the 
votes and voices of many who will neither pay the 
price nor run the risk. It is the consummation of the 
sacrifice of the individual to the State. We have 
trodden that path timorously and not far in the field 
of taxation ; and individualists like the late Auberon 
Herbert, who believed that the State should subsist 
on voluntary contributions, have been long ago 
brushed aside. But when men have been forced by 
the State to give their lives for the State, the capitalist 
will have no moral protection for his property against 
the State, not merely when the State demands a 
fraction of t]ie interest he derives therefr'om, but when 
it demands the whole interest and even the capital 
itself; for a man's life is a greater and more sacred 
thing than capital, and the dead have not paid in 
vulgar fractions. We can hardly afford to contend 



100 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

that the conscription of shirkers has been made legiti- 
mate and possible because the majority of young men 
have offered their lives, whereas the conscription of 
capital is not because there have been few correspond- 
ing volunteers. Perhaps it is well that the war inter- 
fered with the celebration of the seventh centenary of 
Magna Carta, for Magna Carta was the apotheosis of 
the individual's rights against the State, and we are 
witnessing the apotheosis of the rights of the State 
against the individual. 

Like most profound political problems, it is a 
conflict of liberties. Does the right of the individual 
to his own life entitle him to make of none effect the 
sacrifice of their lives by other people ? Shall the 
honoured dead have died in vain, and the liberty of 
the world be held of less account than that of those 
who have not volunteered ? A people camiot solve 
its problems by logic, but only by inspiration, and in 
the crisis we turn instinctively to the most inspiring 
speech of modern times, Lincoln's oration at Gettys- 
burg. He spoke in the throes of a civil war affecting 
one nation only ; we are in the throes of the civil war 
of the human race. The issue is the same, though it 
is being fought on a mightier scale. His occasion was 
the dedication of the field of Gettysburg to those who 
had fallen there, and he continued : — 

" But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we 
cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. 
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, 
have consecrated it far above our poor power to add 
to or detract. The world will little note, nor long 
remember, what we say here, but it can never forget 
what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, 



BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST IN WAR 101 

to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which 
they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great 
task remaining before us — that from these honoured 
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for 
which they gave the last full measure of devotion — 
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not 
have died in vain — that this nation [we should say 
this Empire and this world] under God shall have a 
new birth of freedom — and that government of the 
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish 
from the earth." 



VII. 

HISTORY AND SCIENCE.^ 

A PAGAN professor has remarked that the Greeks 
were happy in having no Bible ; but a votary of the 
Muses might find better excuse for thmking them 
blest in having no science worth mention. At any 
rate, poison-gases, Zeppelin bombs, floating mines, 
and submarine torpedoes discount our modern debt 
to science, and its victims outweigh its martjTS. But 
destructive efficiency tends to truculence and aggres- 
sion ; and the vehement claims recently made to 
an educational predominance, if not a monopoly, for 
science compel the humanist to take up arms in self- 
defence. Many a student of the humanities must in 
the last few months have muttered Juvenal's Hues : — 

Semper ego auditor tantum ? nunquamne reponam 
Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri ? 

Are we ever to listen, and never to reply, to the 
raucous clamour for a more technical, a more ma- 
teriahst, and a less hberal education ? The success 
of the German with his magnificent technique, his 
Charlottenburg, his " reeking tube and iron shard," 
appears to have put fi'esh courage into other assailants 
of the humanities ; and a doughty champion " of 
science has proclaimed that " the future prosperity, 

^ Eeprinted from " History," April, 1916. 
2 Sir E. Ray Lankester in "The Times/' 11 January, 19i6. 

102 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE lOS 

and even the continued existence, of the British 
Empire is absolutely dependent upon a complete 
change in the attitude of its citizens to natural science 
or the knowledge of nature ". " The one and only 
way," we are told, " of saving the country from utter 
inefficiency and consequent ruin is for the legislature 
to entirely remodel the competitions for the valuable 
posts of the Home and Indian Civil Services. The 
elements of chemistry, physics, and biology should be 
made a compulsory subject for all candidates, and as 
much as half the total marks in the competitions 
should be assigned to the great branches of these sub- 
jects ; one quarter to mathematics, and one quarter 
to the whole group described as classics, history, and 
proficiency in the use of the English language ; " and 
as a final threat we are warned that " a terrible re- 
sponsibility rests upon those who, owing to sheer 
ignorance and misapprehension, or to fatal tenderness 
for vested interests, may endeavour to prevent alto- 
gether, or to delay, the drastic reform which alone 
can save the nation's life ". 

If menacing language could frighten reasonable 
men, the historian would throw up the sponge in the 
face of such a verbal onslaught. But encouraged per- 
haps by the reflection that he does not stand alone, 
and fortified, it may be, by some little knowledge 
of the means by which the British Empire has been 
built up, he will not at once abandon his faith and 
surrender to the contention that the continued exist- 
ence of the British Empire depends upon a complete 
repudiation of the means and the methods by which 
it was constructed and has hitherto been maintained. 
He may even be enough of an optimist to think that 



104 THE COMMONWEALfit AT WAR 

the British Empire will come successfully out of this 
war, and to cherish the prospect of putting to his 
critic the question, " If Germany's transient success 
was due to her scientific specialization, may we not 
also say that her ultimate failure was due to her cor- 
responding neglect of moral forces, contempt of 
political wisdom, and defiance of the humanities ? " 
The student of social history will, no doubt, be im- 
pressed by the implicit confidence placed by the 
scientist in the power of the Legislature to reform 
our national defects, and he may be amused at the 
idea that, while our future bureaucrats must be 
chemists, physicists, and biologists, they need know 
nothing of the law, language, literature, philosophy, 
religion, economics, history or geography of the 
countries they hope to govern. It would surely have 
never occurred to anyone but an over-specialized man 
of science that the way to promote efficiency in the 
government of men was to exclude from our system 
of education and examination everything that differ- 
entiates man from the world of matter. 

Objections to classics and history are sometimes 
based on more intellectual grounds. Science, we are 
told, is progi'cssive, ever reaping something new ; 
classics and history deal with the dead that are gone 
and with deeds that are done and finished. Let the 
dead bury their dead, and the living get on with the 
work and the war of the world ! Yet there is no fact 
in history so ancient or so buried in oblivion as the 
origin of life. Is, then, that origin without interest 
for us now and without bearing upon the problems 
we have to face ? And is the origin of man's physical 
existence alone a subject worthy of human attention, 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 105 

and not the growth of his mind and soul ? Are we 
to be interested merely in man as an individual, and 
not in the origins of human societies, nations, and 
empires, states and institutions, laws and customs ? 
Is it only matter that matters to man ? Such ques- 
tions would be ridiculous were it not that proposals 
are being seriously urged for the concentration of 
juvenile minds at the earliest possible age upon the 
materialistic subjects of education and for the restric- 
tion of the compulsory subjects in examinations for 
the public services to chemistry, physics, and biology. 
Apparently there are philosophers who would exclude 
from their philosophy the study of man, except in so 
far as he shares nature with lower animals, and is 
related to physical forces. His relations with fellow- 
men, his responsibilities, his moral and social welfare, 
are almost boastfully banished from this category 
of educational needs. We are to be made efficient 
without any consideration of the ends towards which 
the efficiency is to be directed, to be made capable of 
doing whatever we wish without respect to the good 
or the evil of our ambitions. To say that this out- 
look is characteristically German would be almost an 
insult to German Kultur ; but it is significant that 
an efficiency of this non-moral character is only con- 
sistent with a bureaucratic system under which all 
guidance and all inspiration, and whatever wisdom 
there may be, comes from an autocratic and irrespons- 
ible Government. It would only suit a State whose 
people had abandoned all pretence to be themselves 
judges of policy, and had sunk to the level of mere 
capable instruments in the hands of others. 

The truth is that this controversial turmoil is 



106 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

mainly due to manifold confusions of thought and 
language. Means are mistaken for ends, and words 
for things, and Babel results because its builders do 
not understand one another's speech. When the pro- 
testing Fellows of the Royal Society ^ insist upon the 
need of scientific education, of what are they thmking, 
of a method or of a subject ? or are they confusing the 
two ? They do, indeed, say that they mean " the 
ascertained facts and principles of mechanics, chem- 
istry, physics, biology, geography, and geology," and 
the inclusion of geography may at least be taken as a 
sign of grace, inasmuch as one University Faculty of 
Science recently refused to recognize it as such, or to 
permit candidates to take a master's or doctor's degree 
in it. But for the most part this list is simply a cata- 
logue of the subjects which the memorialists collec- 
tively know ; what they do not know is not science. 
A more reasonable man of science ^ defines the scien- 
tific mind as one wliich " makes sure of its facts before 
arriving at its conclusions ". Precisely so, but in that 
case it is ignorant as well as insolent to affirm that 
not one Oxford college and only one great public 

^ See " The Times/' 2 February, and '* Educational Supple- 
ment," 7 March, 1916. I need hardly remark that in this paper I 
am dealing only with such conceptions of science as are expressed 
by some Fellows of the Royal Society in their memorandum. The 
names of those who have not signed that memorandum are as sig- 
nificant as those of the Fellows who have ; and possibly soiiie signed 
it without entirely concurring in its contents. I have the good 
fortune to know Fellows of the Royal Society, with the sanity of 
whose views on education it would be difficult for any reasonable 
historian to quarrel. 

- Principal Griffiths in " The Times" Educational Supplement, 
7 March, 1916. 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 107 

school is presided over by " a man of scientific train- 
ing ". Moreover, do all students of mechanics, 
chemistry, physics, biology, geography, and geology 
make sure of their facts before arriving at their con- 
clusions ? And is the stupidity of stupid boys who 
try to learn classics due to Latin and Greek ? There 
is just as much scope for the unscientific mind in the 
study of science as there is for the scientific mind in 
the study of history, law, languages, economics, and 
politics ; and to make sure of one's facts before arriv- 
ing at one's conclusions is as much the business of the 
historian, the lawyer, or the politician, as it is of the 
chemist or the physicist. Science would seem to be 
but another name for accurate reasoning, and no 
intelligent person disputes the value of that, or the 
popular neglect of it at all times and by all nations. 

Men of science are well aware of the natural 
tendency towards the atrophy of faculties which are 
not exercised ; but they sometimes ignore the liability 
to that process to which specialization exposes them, 
and consequently mistake a common characteristic 
for a distinctive feature. The neglect of which they 
complain is not distinctive of science, but is a neglect 
common to all aspects of education, and is less marked 
in relation to physical sciences than to other subjects. 
It is the kind of national characteristic illustrated by 
the fact that in 1915, while educational equipment 
was being ruthlessly cut down on all hands, and 
children's school life was being shortened at both 
ends, the nation spent £181,000,000 on alcoholic 
liquor, which was nearly £4 per head of the whole 
population, and over 10 per cent more than it had 
spent in 1914. But this indifference to education is 



108 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

due to no preference for the humanities over science. 
The nation may neglect science ; it neglects the 
humanities with greater unconcern, for they " pay " 
in a less obvious and materialistic way than physical 
science. It would be quite safe to assert that nearly 
every one of the signatories to this memorandum, if 
he occupies a university chair, receives a much higher 
salary than his humanistic colleagues, and that for 
every pound given in recent years for the endowment 
of the humanities, a hundred have been given for the 
endowment of science. The plaintiffs lament that 
only one eminent man of science has ever sat in a 
British Cabinet. Do they sit in German Cabinets ? 
Bismarck, who made the German Empire, was not a 
man of science, though Edward II and Louis XVI, 
who lost their thrones, were excellent mechanics. 
But how many eminent classical scholars or his- 
torians have sat in British Cabinets ? The scientists 
contend that great scientific discoverers and inventors 
should as a matter of course be included in the Privy 
Council, apparently under the impression that that 
would give them the coveted political influence. Yet 
what student of history would ever have made it a 
grievance that Gibbon, Hallam, Grote, Froude, Free- 
man, Stubbs, Gardiner, Green, Maine, and JNlaitland 
were not sworn of the Privy Council ? And why 
should Fellows of the Royal Society nowadays claim 
a position to which Newton, Priestley, and Darwin 
never aspired ? 

The explanation would seem to lie in that con- 
fusion of the part with the whole, to which excessive 
specialization leads, and in the assumption that the 
science of physical nature comprehends the science 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 109 

of human government. Of the thirty-six scientific 
memoriahsts, a third have themselves received at the 
hands of the Crown marks of distinction which are 
never conferred on historians for their services to his- 
tory. Historians have to be content with a less osten- 
tatious reward in influence, and the " neglect of 
science " appears to consist in the failure of men of 
science to attain to pohtical weight. One might as 
well complain that the gas-officers now at the front 
are not promoted to regimental commands. There 
is, in fact, no reason why men of science, classical 
scholars, or historians should sit in Cabinets at all, 
because a Cabinet has to deal with poMtics, and politics 
are not the busmess of the savant. Science is, indeed, 
a necessity, and Governments have to employ men of 
science to an ever-increasing extent, but they also 
employ engineers, surveyors, architects, pohcemen, 
and spies. Are we to have surgeons and doctors in 
the Cabinet because surgery and medicine are matters 
of vital importance ? Must we have cooks in the 
House of Commons because we cannot get on with- 
out them in the kitchen ? We are often told how 
important it is that we should understand what we 
are doing when we smtch on an electric light, drive 
a motor, digest a dinner, and so forth ; and it is piti- 
able that children should be brought up with no eye 
for nature, for the flowers at their feet and the stars 
above their heads. But we do not mend matters by 
encouraging them to ignore the highest work of nature, 
man ; and in a democratic State it is more important 
that men should reahze what they are doing when 
they cast a vote, upset a Government, and make or 
mar an emiDire. No doubt a greater addiction to 



no THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

physical science might have enabled us to kill Germans 
in greater numbers and with greater speed, and thus 
to have saved lives of our fellow-countrymen. But 
if our " people are destroyed for lack of knowledge," 
what of the Germans ? and what of Germany ? Has 
their superior technique saved them from destruction ? 
and will it save their country or their souls ? Neglect 
of the physical sciences is assuredly injudicious, but 
neglect of wisdom carries with it not less fatal conse- 
quences ; and folly could hardly go further than to 
confine the injunction to get understanding to getting 
a knowledge of physical forces. 

It is not without reason that logic does not appear 
in the list of sciences urged upon our attention. The 
memorialists condescend to exempt the British Navy 
and the Army Medical Corps from their censure, and 
they imply that the success of both is due to their 
scientific training. It will be news that training of 
naval officers necessarily implies devotion to chemistry, 
biology, or geology ; and naval tactics and strategy, 
the arts of navigation and seamanship, are not among 
the physical sciences. But it is not news that the 
success of the Navy is largely due to its traditions, 
and that naval history is an integral part of naval 
education. What, however, is the relevance of the 
reference to the Army Medical Corps ? The general 
argument is that science should be the avenue to in- 
fluence or command in the widest national spheres, a 
key to unlock tlie door of Cabinets, and a path to the 
summits of the Civil Service. The mention of the 
scientific training of the Army Medical Corps would 
therefore seem to suggest that army doctors should 
be made generals in command, and navy surgeons 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 111 

admirals of the fleet. The fallacy springs from quite a 
simple confusion of the whole circle of intellect with 
one of its segments. The physical sciences are not 
co-extensive with human knowledge, and even the 
scientific method is not the only means of mental 
training. Each department of human activity has 
both its science and its art ; the training, methods, 
and temper which make a master of one art do not 
necessarily even apprentice him to the others ; and 
nothing but ignorance of the others can lead the 
speciaUst in physical science to think his method a 
panacea for inefficiency in politics, diplomacy, and war. 
The point that excessive specialization induces mental 
limitations might be pressed a little further. The 
Fellows of the Royal Society brandish a number of 
scientific mistakes committed by the Government as 
proof of the need of scientific training and of the use- 
lessness of the humanities. But unless we are misin- 
formed by men of science, some of these blunders at 
least were due to Fellows of the Royal Society who 
undertook to advise the Government in branches of 
science with the details of which they were not familiar ; 
and the scientific errors of the Foreign Office arose 
from its failure to grasp, not the virtues, but the limi- 
tations of a specialized scientific training. 

The history of the Royal Society itself is not with- 
out a similar moral. We do not dispute its wisdom 
in seeking to restrict its scope and its fellows to physi- 
cal science, and in thus driving their whilom colleagues 
into a schismatic British Academy. But having by 
their own act cut themselves loose from law, politics, 
and the humanities, it is surely illogical to complain 
of the consequent circumscription of their influence 



112 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

with the pubhc. It may have been well to concen- 
trate, but we can only concentrate at the cost of com- 
prehension ; and eminence in physical science is often 
a positive bar to the comprehension of the human 
mind. Men cannot be treated as matter ; we cannot 
analyse popular feeling in a test-tube, or dispose of 
public opinion by means of a retort. We cannot vivi- 
sect our voters, or control political motions by means 
of mechanical cranks. Vast problems of Imperial 
unity are looming on the Cabinet's horizon, but it mil 
be wiser to listen to Sir Robert Borden and Mr. 
Hughes than to recruit its numbers from the ranks of 
British chemists and biologists. Nor would a student 
of politics, unless he were a German, have gravely 
proposed to enhance the repute of science by suggest- 
ing an Act of Parliament for the redistribution of 
marks in the Civil Service examination. 

Even in that minor detail the men of science are 
not very scientific. They complain that " in Latin 
and Greek alone {including ancient history) " candi- 
dates can obtain 3200 marks, " while for science the 
maximum is 2400 " — as if ancient history were merely 
another name for Latin and Greek, and not a separate 
subject as much as the "four distinct branches of 
science," which the scientific candidate must take to 
secure his maximum of 2400 marks. They exclude 
from " science " logic and psychology, economics, and 
political science, which would bring the " scientist's " 
maximum up to 4100 marks ; and they ignore mathe- 
matics, to wliich another 2400 marks are assigned, 
altogether ! They imply that the physicist, for in- 
stance, would get no marks for mathematics. Nor 
would it seem quite discreet, while urging the claims 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 113 

of science to weight iii political training, to assume 
that a knowledge of modern languages has no natural 
part in scientific equipment. Valour, too, gets the 
better of discretion in the bold assertion that the late 
Lord Playfair was the only Cabinet Minister with a 
scientific training " in the whole history of British 
Governments ". For, after all, British Governments 
have managed to foster and maintain a respectable 
British Empire, and is it prudent to proclaim that 
they have so far succeeded with only Lord Play fair's 
scientific assistance ? Moreover, Lord Playfair, while 
Postmaster-General for a few months, and Vice-Pre- 
sident of the Council for a few more, was never a 
Cabinet Minister. Is it not characteristic of the scien- 
tific mind that " it makes sure of its facts before arriv- 
ing at its conclusions " ? 

In reahty the antithesis between Science and Art 
is pernicious and false. It is a purely arbitrary dis- 
tinction which terms some subjects sciences and others 
arts ; and one may speak of political science, economic 
science, legal science, mihtary science, historical 
science, quite as legitimately as one does of physical 
science. The distinction is not of substance, but of 
methods : the scientific method is primarily analytical, 
the artistic is synthetic. But there is science in every 
art, and art in every science ; in other words, both 
methods are essential to every subject. The artist 
cannot dispense with analysis, nor the scientist with 
synthesis. The artist must analyse his material before 
he can use it with effect, and the scientist must articu- 
late his results if they are to be fruitful and inteUigible. 
The relative value of the two methods will vary in 

different subjects, but a civil war between them is 

8 



114 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

educational suicide in face of the common danger of 
popular neglect. The attention the public pays to 
the humanities is not worth diverting to science, and 
Fellows of the Royal Society can serve their country 
in better ways than by claiming the endowments of 
the humanities, setting their affections on seats in the 
Cabinet and Privy Council, and bidding for marks in 
examinations for clerkships for which neither science 
nor scholarship is the essential qualification. It is a 
German ambition to annex the domains of others in 
the hope of making their own a place in the sun ; and 
the predominance claimed for science in education 
suggests that the aim of the scientists, hke that of the 
Germans, is not a place in the sun but control of the 
sunshine. In other words, their ideal is not educa- 
tional freedom, but a monopoly or at least a Hon's 
share of influence, secured and guaranteed by legis- 
lation rather than by the persuasive effects of their 
teaching. 

Suspicion of such a tendency is fostered by a singu- 
lar omission in the memorandum of the Fellows of the 
Royal Society. Two universities only are mentioned, 
Oxford and Cambridge ; yet there are half a dozen 
others in England alone. \Vhy this concentrated 
attack on the two universities where the humanities 
still withstand, with partial success, the pretensions of 
science to predominance, if predominance in all is not 
the summit of scientific ambition ? Why, if scientific 
subjects and scientific methods are so superior, has not 
their predominance in the great majority of English 
universities given science the national influence which 
its champions deem its due ? It is true that in several 
of those universities, notably Leeds, Sheffield, and 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 115 

Armstrong College, students of the humanities rather 
than of science have been preferred to the seat of 
authority, but assuredly not because classical scholars 
or historians outnumbered the scientific voters. The 
inference is that, when it comes to questions of govern- 
ment, scientists themselves have recognized the fact 
that a training in the humanities is a first-class quali- 
fication. For this reluctant or unconscious admission 
there are two sound reasons. The first is that students 
of physical science tend to specialize at an early age, 
and early specialization is a doubtful aid to ultimate 
success, even in the particular branch of knowledge in 
which it is practised, and it is a positive disqualification 
for success in a wider sphere. The greatest theologians 
have not been those who specialized earliest in a theo- 
logical course ; the most eminent physicians are not 
those who have started practice without a degree ; and 
the greatest lawyers have not been graduates in our 
law schools. Literce Hujiianiores at Oxford and the 
Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge have both pro- 
vided surer guarantees of success at the bar and on 
the bench than the specialized law schools of the two 
universities. The same criterion holds good for the 
episcopal bench and theological studies ; while emin- 
ence is barred to the historian who has not equipped 
himself with a general education in other subjects than 
history. 

The second reason for the failure of physical 
science to guarantee to its students and professors 
the political weight, to which they consider themselves 
entitled, is equally fundamental. It is undoubtedly 
true that the physical sciences and the methods em- 
ployed in their study do permit Df greater exactitude 



116 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

than the humanities. But it is a mere illusion to 
suppose that the same methods applied to the study 
of man will produce a corresponding exactitude in 
political deduction or precision in human conduct. 
Politics may not be scientific, but they will not be 
made so by the apphcation to them of generahzations 
and ideas derived from the study of earth-worms and 
bacteria. Mind is more complex than matter, and 
human action cannot be expressed in formulae. The 
very fact that formulae play so large a part in the 
methods employed in the study of physical science 
renders those methods less applicable to humaner 
studies. Yet this is what the student of physical 
science finds it so difficult to understand ; his absorp- 
tion in his own subject and its methods limits his com- 
prehension of other methods. An eminent Fellow of 
the Royal Society was induced to read a notable book 
on mediasval literature : his puzzled comment at the 
end was, " What does it prove ? " Another once 
gibed at theology that it was not " an exact science," 
as if the relations of God and man were unimportant 
for not being matters of three dimensions. The arts 
prove nothing ; theii* function is to create. Govern- 
ment is an art, and the statesman must rely upon 
intuition and inspiration as well as upon accurate 
knowledge and reasoning. There is intuition in 
science as well, but it plays a smaller part because 
its path is more narrowly defined by ascertained and 
ascertainable fact. The difference is also one between 
experiment and experience : the scientist can experi- 
ment with comparative impunity ; the statesman does 
so at greater risk, and he works with subtler forces. 
He has, so to speak, to gamble in unknown futures ; 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 117 

his stakes are the hves of men and the welfare of 
nations, and for them he is held responsible. A ruler 
or a general, who by a mistake sends his fellow-men 
to their death, has to render an account, but no one 
expects anything but a bill from the man of science 
who invents a torpedo or poison gas. He invents 
them in complete indifference to the causes they may 
be made to serve, because he is a man of science and 
not a statesman ; and the irresponsibility, which pro- 
tects the chemist in his laboratory, often characterizes 
his intrusions into politics. Politics are not as moral 
as they should be, but no one denies the connexion 
between them and ethics. There are, however, no 
ethics in physical science ; its aim is simple efficiency, 
which promotes evil as well as good. We need moral 
and pohtical responsibility to save science from the 
service of the devil ; and science itself is no proof of 
that wisdom or understanding which is born of a 
sense of responsibility. 

It is, unfortunately, much easier to get knowledge 
than understanding, and the glamour of science con- 
sists to no small extent in its novelty. But it is an 
odd reproach to bring against history that it is a 
completed and finished subject at a moment when 
the world is engaged in making new history with an 
energy and an intensity never before equalled in the 
annals of mankind. So far as the raw material for 
study is concerned, it is physical science rather than 
history which is the completed and finished subject ; 
for no science can add to or diminish the physical 
content of the universe. That is fixed and immutable 
by any human agency, and the truths and " laws " of 
nature remain to-day precisely what they were a 



118 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

million years ago. On the other hand, the achieve- 
ments of mankind, which form the historian's subject- 
matter, are growing from day to day and hour to hour, 
and the whole human race is busied in the process. 
History deals with conscious creators and not with un- 
reasoning matter, with the architects of nations and 
of churches, vA\h the growth of human societies, and 
the reasons why empires rise and fall. It is conceiv- 
able that physical nature might yield up all her secrets 
to scientific research ; but history ^dll have fi'esh 
material so long as the human race shall last, and 
when science has finished its labours they will remain 
for history to record. 

It may be objected that, while the subject-matter 
of history multiplies and that of physical science does 
not, science is nevertheless the more important study 
because the scientist makes science, but the historian 
only writes history. The objection in any case needs 
qualification ; Treitschke is reckoned by Germans 
themselves as one of the makers of modern Germany, 
and Thiers' Napoleonic histories contributed to the 
establishment of the second French Empire. But 
scientists only make science in the sense of revealing 
scientific truth, and historians make history in a 
similar way. The scientist seeks to explain the 
mechanism of the physical world ; he does not pretend 
to make the Nature he studies, and his influence over 
the course of Nature is assuredly no greater than the 
historian's over the course of history. For history 
deals with what man has done and how he has done 
it ; and that knowledge is at least some guide to what 
he can do in the future and how he should seek to do 
it. It is from the study of physical science rather than 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE II9 

from that of history that men have deduced the 
paralysing dogma of the helplessness of mankind. 

We have not, indeed, far to look for proofs of 
the need of historical education. Si monumentum 
quceris, drcumspice. The memorandum of the Fellows 
of the Royal Society itself provides an illustration, for 
a study of the his'tory of their own Society might 
have furnished them with solutions of some of their 
own problems. Among its earlier presidents are to 
be found First Lords of the Treasury, Lord High 
Admirals, Lord Chancellors, Chancellors of the Ex- 
chequer, Secretaries of State, and diplomatists. It is 
due to the men of science that such is no longer the 
case ; had it been, they would have had no cause to 
complain of their lack of political influence and of re- 
presentation in the Cabinet or Privy Council. The 
newspaper press, again, daily supplies evidence of a 
still more pernicious absence of historical knowledge, 
perspective, and judgment. JournaUsts and poHticians 
praise or condemn the conduct of their own Govern- 
ment in diplomacy and war with obviously no con- 
ception of the conditions which determine diplomatic 
and military action, and therefore no standard by which 
to judge them. The standard seems to be an entirely 
imaginary and impossible set of circumstances, in which 
British generals never lose a campaign or a battle, in 
which British officers never make a mistake, and British 
armies never retreat or fail in attack. That there never 
was any such war does not trouble them in the least ; if 
they have ever heard of wars in the past, they have for- 
gotten the delays and reverses which have accompanied 
the triumphs of the greatest commanders. They have 
some vague idea that the Seven Years' War and the 



120 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Napoleonic Wars secured the Empire for Great Britain 
and frustrated the tyranny of Napoleon ; but they 
look on those wars through a mist as a grand triumphal 
progi'css from one success to another ; and, if the pre- 
sent war does not correspond with their imagination, 
they attribute the failure, not to their own ignorance, 
but to the incompetence of their Government or their 
generals. They may have heard of the execution of 
Admiral Byng, but they conveniently ignore its in- 
justice and forget that it was due to a popular clamour 
as ill-informed as their own ; and few remember that 
in 1809 the Common Council of the City of London 
petitioned the Crown against the conferment of any 
distinction on Wellington after Talavera. " That 
calamity," declared the petitioners, whose protest was 
gleefully reproduced by Napoleon in the *' Moniteur," 
*' like the others, had passed without any inquiry, and 
as if their long experienced impunity had put tlie 
servants of the Crown above the reach of justice. 
Ministers have actually gone the length of advising 
your Majesty to confer honourable distmction on a 
general who has thus exhibited, mth equal rasliness 
and ostentation, nothing but a useless valour." 

Current imitations of this attitude might be re- 
strained by a little knowledge of British history, and 
by a recollection of the facts that no long war has 
been won without reverses, and that in long wars the 
Power which begins with success commonly ends with 
failure. The Seven Years' War and the wars of the 
revolutionary and Napoleonic period are useful cases 
in point. The first began in May, 1756, and two 
years elapsed before any real success attended British 
arms. Meanwhile the nation had to endure Brad- 



\ 

HISTORY AND SCIENCE 121 

dock's defeat at Fort Duquesne, Montcalm's seizure 
of Oswego and most of the keys of the British Colonies 
in North America, the failure before Louisbourg, the 
tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta, the loss of 
Minorca, the Convention of Klosterseven, and the 
fruitless attacks on Rochefort and St. Malo. The 
later war with France began as inauspiciously, and mis- 
fortunes continued longer. The British armies were 
soon driven out of Flanders, and our efforts to sup- 
port the Royalists at Toulon and in La Vendee were 
equally unsuccessful. Even our naval victories did 
not save us from having to evacuate the Mediterranean 
in 1796 and to suffer an invasion in Ireland in 1798. 
Ten years later Whitelocke's expedition to Buenos 
Aires was a total failure, and Duckworth's forcing of 
the Dardanelles a fiasco. Walcheren was hardly a 
success, and five years' campaigning in the Peninsula 
preluded WelUngton's triumph. 

Without some knowledge of such reverses it is 
impossible to have any vaUd standard whereby to 
judge our failures and achievements in the present 
war. The absence of it produces the impatience and 
lack of perspective, of which is born the revolutionary 
temperament, and for similar reasons. The dangerous 
revolutionist is commonly a person with little know- 
ledge of history or practical experience in politics. 
Out of his inner consciousness and liberal imagination 
he evolves an ideal repubUc, a new heaven and a new 
earth ; and a comparison of this ideal state with the 
defects of existing society stirs his indignation and his 
desire for some short cut to his mirage. He attributes 
the evils he sees to incompetent or malignant minds, 
and he demands a revolution, a change of Government, 



122 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

or at least a scapegoat, fondly imagining that a change 
of persons will remove the obstacles to the realization 
of his dreams. A similar ignorance of international 
law and obligations provokes impatient criticism of 
our so-called blockade ; and critics, forgetful of the 
Armed Neutrahty of 1780, see no reason why we 
should not blockade the ports of neutral States, not 
pausing to think that a blockade is a naval siege, and 
a siege is an act of war. 

The same objection hes against the popular, or 
unpopular, cry for democratic control of diplomacy. 
In a sense democratic control is secured by the British 
Constitution ; for foreign policy is in the hands of 
Ministers responsible to a popularly elected House of 
Commons, and the foreign policy pursued must com- 
mend itself in general terms to the representatives of 
the constituencies. But the further claim that nego- 
tiations and treaties must be made public, and sanc- 
tioned by popular vote, before they are initiated or 
concluded, is simply a proposition that expert know- 
ledge should be controlled by general ignorance. 
There is as good a case for leaving diplomacy to the 
diplomatists as there is for leaving science to the 
scientists. Democratic control is not an impossibility, 
but it depends upon democratic education ; and when 
the education of democracy comprises an adequate 
study of history, foreign politics, and law, democracy 
may exercise a control over diplomacy similar to that 
which it might exercise over scientific research if 
public elementary education provided the requisite 
training. The cry for democratic control is illogical 
without a precedent demand for democratic educa- 
tion ; and the exclusion of history from our curricula 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 123 

would simply postpone the era of sound democratic 
politics. 

War and diplomacy are the aspects of politics, for 
the right understanding of which some historical 
education seems most obviously needed at the mo- 
ment ; but the war will be followed by problems for 
the solution of which a constant reference to history 
will be no less essential. How are statesmen to de- 
termine, and peoples to judge, the principles of the 
rearrangement of Europe without some knowledge 
of the origins and development of European States, 
and of their claims to the territory they occupy and 
to the allegiance of their subjects ? What help will 
physical science give us in our attempt to do justice 
to the aspirations of Russians and Poles, Germans 
and Danes, Czechs and Magyars, Serbs and Italians, 
Bulgars and Greeks ? Or how will it help us to solve 
our own more immediate problems of Empire ? 
Mere enthusiasm, bred of the war, will not give us 
wisdom to reconcile the manifold cross-currents of 
civilization and ideas which are the life-blood of the 
British realms, nor to construct a really Imperial 
Government out of the infinite variety of constitu- 
tional, social, and economic organization evolved in 
response to their different needs. The outbreak of 
the war led education authorities into hasty attempts 
to improvise a historical sense in schools in order that 
its issues might be intelligible. The approach of 
peace will produce a number of similar improvisa- 
tions to make up for time and opportunities lost in 
the neglect to provide education in the elements of 
Imperial understanding. 

We are most of us like the unskilful boxer, de- 



124 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

scribed by Demosthenes, who is always thinking of 
where he was last hit and never of where he is hkely 
to receive the next blow ; and we are busily contri\dng 
to do after the peace what we think we should have 
done, had we known, to prepare for the war. So the 
problem of the American colonies in 1765 came upon 
a people unprepared, because their minds were ab- 
sorbed in the recollections of the Seven Years' War, 
and our grandfathers nearly brought England to civil 
strife over CathoHc Emancipation and the Reform 
BiU of 1832, because they were engi'ossed in the 
memory of the French Revolution and Napoleon. It 
will not be by preparation for war that the problems 
of the commg age will be solved ; and the next gen- 
eration will have to rely on its own intuition rather 
than on imitation of its predecessor. The chief 
educational lesson of the war bids fair to be lost in 
vain repetition. This war has been the passing of a 
generation, the Dead JNIarch of the men of blood 
and iron, the epitaph upon the latest age of scientific 
progress. That age was one of vast material prosper- 
ity, an age in which the growth of man's control over 
physical forces outran his control over human passions, 
an age in which he gave more thought to the destruc- 
tion of human bodies than to the saving of human 
souls, and made more haste to get wealth and power 
than to get understanding in their use. The clamour 
for a more materialistic education is simply a reflex, 
and not a corrective, of this secular evil ; and it finds 
its counterpart in the impatience of legality in our 
methods of war and of restraint in our diplomacy. 
We run the risk of infection by German I'calpoUtik, 
and we shall do well to remember the modern applica- 



HISTORY AND SCIENCE 125 

tion of the sixteenth-century jiiigle, " An EngUshman 
Italianate is a devil incarnate ". What we need for 
the future is not less, but greater, respect for law, not 
a more materiahstic, but a more humane, education. 
Our ideal frontier Avill not be the frontiers of European 
States, which millions of men and hundreds of forts 
have failed to render secure, but that peaceful border 
between the United States and Canada, which remains 
the strongest frontier in the world because it reposes 
on moral and not on military strength, and embodies 
the triumph, not of nation over nation, but of nations 
over themselves. If we compare the cost of that 
moral security with the cost, in treasure and blood, 
of the martial insecurity of Europe, we may measure 
the comparative values of materialistic and moral 
development. In olden times G-rcecia capta Jerum 
victorem cepit ; it is for us to see that the conquered 
Hun does not in fatal revenge expel humanity from 
our education. 



VIII. 

THE RECANT OF PATRIOTISM.^ 

" The honourable member," replied Lord John RusseU 
once to Sir Francis Burdett, " talks of the cant of 
patriotism ; but there is something worse than the cant 
of patriotism, and that is the recant of patriotism." 
Mr. Gladstone was of the opinion that no cleverer 
retort was ever made than Lord John's ; and while 
we hope, for the repute of human Avit, that this appre- 
ciation is exaggerated, the repartee gives point to 
some thoughts on the cause of our present discontents. 
It is not that we are suffering from that academic 
recant of patriotism of which Lord John Russell com- 
plained in Sir Francis Burdett, for 

A steady patriot of the world alone, 
The friend of every country but his own, 

is rare enough at the present moment on this side of 
the Atlantic. But we see signs of a more practical 
and dangerous relapse from the vision of Pisgah, which 
enables us to see life steady and to see it whole, and 
of a reversion to original types of narrow outlook which 
make patriotism purblind. 

Patriotism is, of course, a compound and a com- 
promise. Dr. Johnson had a special perversion of it 
in mind when he described it as the last refuge of a 

^ Reprinted from the " Westminster Gazette," May, I916. 

126 



THE RECANT OF PATRIOTISM 127 

scoundrel, and we could most of us point in private to 
several modern examples. To the citizen of the world 
all patriotism confined to one nation seems little better 
than an expanded selfishness. The patriot wants his 
country to be great because its greatness swells his 
vanity and puffs up his feeling of importance. Pal- 
merston's speech on the text " Civis Romanus sum " 
was an example of this waving of the red rag of national 
pride ; and there are great causes in which it is impos- 
sible to be a patriot. One cannot be patriotic over 
reUgion ; in so far as a Pope is a patriot, he is false to 
that for which he stands. Patriotic truth is generally 
— like Protestant truth or Catholic truth — a periphrasis 
for such falsehood as consists in the suppression of 
truth which is not convenient ; and patriotic law, 
patriotic surgery, patriotic science, patriotic scholar- 
ship, are incompatible terms. The frontiers which 
mark off" one nationaUty from another have no relev- 
ance to the realms of science, and the more closely 
education observes national limitations the less it is 
education. National patriotism is in a sense a con- 
fession of human weakness, just as in a similar sense 
political parties are a confession of national weakness. 
They are, albeit themselves vociferous, a tacit admis- 
sion of the fact that it is impossible to get the maxi- 
mum effort out of men except by appeals to more or 
less primitive instincts ; and the combative instinct 
is the lever by which we secure the co-operation and 
self-sacrifice needed for collective enterprise. When 
the nations are at peace the combative instinct finds 
expression in party warfare ; but even party warfare 
serves a unifying purpose and marks a stage in national 
fusion. The significance of our Wars of the Roses 



128 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

was not theii' disruptive aspect, but the fusion of end- 
less local feuds into two great parties, which prepared 
the way for national unity under the Tudors ; and the 
common bonds which keep the United States together 
to-day are not so much their federal constitution or 
national organization as the party systems which over- 
ride the distinction of States, and provide popular 
links between East and West, and North and South. 
Just as party feeling represents a fusion of local parties, 
so national patriotism, however far it may fall short 
of the cathoUc and cosmopohtan ideals of religion and 
humanity, represents an expansion of early mediaeval 
locaHsm ; and it was a matter of slow and painful 
growth. It was only by degrees that parochialism 
expanded into provincialism, and provincialism into 
nationalism, that guilds merged their independence in 
municipal organization, that boroughs and cities sur- 
rendered their fiscal autonomy and their market- 
exclusiveness, and that provincial Estates grew mto 
Estates-General, and the various Estates into one 
national Estate or State. The process is not complete 
in any country, and personal selfishness still competes 
with local patriotism, and local patriotism with devo- 
tion to the national State. 

Patriotism is not, therefore, a natural instinct, but 
an acquired characteristic. It is the polish which 
makes man a political animal, just as manners and the 
inward grace, of which they are the outward mani- 
festation, make him a unit of society. But, hke all 
acquired characteristics, patriotism tends to fall away 
under stress and friction. Manners sometimes break 
down under provocation, and our patriotism at the 
moment looks more threadbare than it did a year or 



THE RECANT OF PATRIOTISM 129 

eighteen months ago. It is not that the war has made 
us more cosmopoHtan or humane, but the trial of 
patience strains the bonds of patriotism, and weakens 
our power to resist reaction and reversion to original 
types of selfishness and parochialism. The individual, 
the class, the locality come once more into prominence 
and dwarf our acquired sense of national proportion. 
A Zeppelin drops a bomb in our garden, and we 
straightway forget the Western or any other front 
except our own, and vote, if we get the chance, for 
an all-air or all-gas Parliamentary candidate, pledged 
to make the defence of our particular person or cab- 
bage-patch the first concern of national policy. A 
German airship is brought down at the mouth of the 
Thames, and we rejoice more greatly over that one 
sinner brought to account than over the capture of 
Erzerum or the successful defence of Verdun. We 
read without turning a hair of fifty thousand British 
casualties at the battle of Loos ; but a hundred 
casualties in the Midlands precipitate a meeting of 
indignation in the City and a cabal to overturn the 
Government. Having by long experience been 
brought to realize that successful war can only be 
waged by co-operation between the two great services, 
we are told by the novi homines of the air that it 
can only be won by the independence of the parvenu. 
Instead of seeing the war steadily and seeing it whole, 
we can only see it in our own compartment, whether 
that compartment is a service, a class, a locality, or 
even a self. Our soldiers are divided into groups and 
classes, and civil strife is engendered between bachelors, 
married men who have attested, those who have not, 

munition-workers, starred and unstarred industries ; 

9 



130 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

and we are reduced to volunteers who volunteer on 
the understanding that others are forced to serve 
with the same risks but without the same armlets or 
honour. Truly those who went at the call of duty a 
year and a half ago and have stood ever since between 
the allies and defeat have left us a poorer breed in 
England ; and our present performances in politics 
are due to the fact that the real England has gone to 
the front, leaving only the domestics at home — to 
spend more on drink than the whole nation did before 
the war, and then to fight by-elections in the sacred 
cause of unrestricted liquor. 

The domestics are not, however, devoid of martial 
instincts, and smce cu'cumstances prohibit the satisfac- 
tion of those instincts at the enemy's expense, they 
seek nearer means of gratification. In the INIiddle 
Ages, while the Crusaders made for the misbeliever 
in the East, the less adventurous strove to do their bit 
by massacring and plundering the Jews at home. So 
some of us try to prove our patriotism by smelling out 
crypto -Germans in the Foreign Office, and scenting 
German proclivities in the purlieus of Whitehall. 
We long to get at somebody ; and, real Germans 
being out of reach, we fall back on some familiar ob- 
ject of our animosity. The Government is a godsend 
for this purpose, for the Government is the traditional 
object of attack with half the EngHsh people. The 
Coalition disconcerted for the time the inveterate habit 
of abuse ; but custom is recovering its ascendency and 
beginning to accommodate itself to fresh surroundings. 
Its adaptation to circumstances is occasionally some- 
what violent, and the curves it executes a trifle sharp. 
In the old days before the war Liberals and Unionists 



THE RECANT OF PATRIOTISM 131 

were convinced that their respective leaders were the 
ablest statesmen of their age ; and if any private doubts 
were harboured they were rigorously repressed to 
avoid betrayal of the cause. That was when our party 
leaders were engaged on party business ; now that 
they have combined to do the nation's work they have 
suddenly lost the brains they had and degenerated 
into a gang of incompetent and unprincipled politicians, 
and it becomes the patriot's duty to parade their 
shortcomings before the eager gaze of the national foe. 
One able editor delivers himself of the following bril- 
liant apophthegm : " These military blunders are never 
the fault of our soldiers, they are sometimes the fault 
of our generals, they are always the fault of the 
Government " ; and mob panic at Zeppelin raids has 
produced some wonderful conversions to belief in 
popular wisdom, for clamour against the Government 
is proof of democratic discrimination. Hobbes's old- 
fashioned view was that the State must be absolute 
because it is the plenipotentiary of every individual 
citizen ; our modern version is that Government is the 
universal scapegoat. We commonly think those 
sermons the best which point most obviously at our 
neighbour : the Government is our universal neigh- 
bour, and we prove our patriotism to ourselves by 
exhibiting its delinquencies, and salve our conscience 
by confessing the sins of our leaders. What able 
editor ever said " we " have erred and strayed, or 
demanded a pillory for the Press and a penitentiary 
for the critic ? 

These public confessions of Government misdeeds 
are, however, less painful than the private resentment 
which is encouraged by the loss of patriotic proportion 



132 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

and concentration on individual woes. Government 
is charged \\dth " murdering " British airmen because 
there are defects in British aircraft, and the poisoned 
arrow leaves a festering wound in the sorrowing heart. 
]\Ien are slain at the front through lack of munitions, 
and we assume that an efficient Government would 
contrive to wage war without any casualties at all, or 
at least with casualties which only befell other people's 
kindred. The private grief is made a grievance against 
a national Government, and used to disintegrate 
national confidence. We bid fair to succumb to the 
weakness of which we used to accuse the French, 
while they have proved their possession of virtues we 
thought were British — stubbornness in defence, pati- 
ence under misfortune, and long-suffering under losses 
compared with which our own are small. It is not 
from French lips that we have heard during this war 
that fatal cry Nous sommes trahis ; but it has be- 
come the regular greeting of one of our martial 
publicists, who escaped the JNIihtary Service Act by 
the skin of his teeth and stayed at home to wage 
wordy warfare on his Government. 

It is the blight of inaction and impatience Avhich 
causes us thus to recant our national faith. Fortun- 
ately it makes no impression on our fi*ont, where men 
do deeds instead of cavilling at them ; and there are 
some pungent remarks by that excellent writer " The 
Junior Sub. " on the " holy show " which part of the 
British Press is making of itself It may also be some 
consolation that these gentry are only doing what their 
kind have always done before them. There has liardly 
been a great public servant who has not suffered from 
public and private obloquy, and national crises have 



THE RECANT OF PATRIOTISM 13g 

never sufficed to silence the tongue of slander. Wel- 
lington was attacked by the Common Council of 
London during the Peninsular war ; the victor of St. 
Vincent was charged with dereliction of duty ; and in 
England's darkest days of 1797, when the King and 
Queen went to St. Paul's to render thanks for three 
great naval victories, the mob hooted in the streets 
" the pilot who weathered the storm ". 



IX. 

HAS GREAT BRITAIN CEASED TO BE AN 

ISLAND?^ 

In a recent speech Lord NorthclifFe remarked that 
the flying machine " has entirely changed the position 
of our (sic) kingdom from being an island to being 
part of the Continent ". The observation, or some- 
thing like it, has been made by others less interested 
in aircraft than Lord Northcliffe, and bids fair to be- 
come one of those commonplaces, the constant repeti- 
tion of which does duty with most of us for original 
ideas of our own and for the critical examination of 
other people's. Before, however, we suffer the para- 
dox to pass into the common stock of truisms, it may 
be worth while examining its passports and inquiring 
what it means. 

Literally, of course, it is nonsense ; an island is a 
tract of land completely surrounded by water, but not 
big enough to be called a continent. No one proposes 
to call Great Britain a continent, or to drain the 
Narrow Seas ; and Great Britain will therefore con- 
tinue to be an island in the literal sense, whatever 
Lord Northcliffe may say or Zeppelins may do. But 
the statement is meant to be metaphorical, and there's 
the rub ; for it is impossible to define with any ex- 

1 " Westminster Gazette," 11 July, 1916. 
134 



HAS GREAT BRITAIN CEASED TO BE AN ISLAND? 135 

actitude a metaphorical meaning, and in this meta- 
phorical sense " an island " is clearly becoming one of 
those terms hke " command of the sea " and " a fleet 
in being," of which it has been said that when used at 
random they cover a perfect morass of loose thinking. 
We are painfully aware of the fact that Zeppelins and 
aeroplanes can drop bombs on English soil, and we 
put ourselves to considerable inconvenience and ex- 
pense to disconcert these enemy attacks. But to de- 
duce from them the sweeping generahzation that 
Britain is ceasing to be an island is a logical process 
which requires sifting. 

We have never in any great war, a category from 
which the Crimean and Colonial wars must be ex- 
cluded, been entirely immune from naval bombard- 
ment or from raids. But if that liability has robbed 
us of insular security, that is an advantage we have 
never enjoyed. It is true that the risk was confined 
to our coasts, but its extension by Zeppelins to inland 
districts is not in itself sufficient to make Great Britain 
part of the Continent. What then has been the 
military meaning of our insular security ? Surely, 
that Great Britain could not be conquered or invaded 
so long as she retained command of the seas, and was 
thus free from the fears that haunted Continental 
nations. If there is any meaning in the contention 
that Britain has ceased to be an island and become 
part of the Continent of Europe, it cannot be merely 
that we are liable to Zeppelin raids, but that lack of 
command of the air exposes us to those risks of con- 
quest and invasion to which we should be liable if we 
lost command of the sea or were joined to the Con- 
tinent by land. The alarm arises from an implied 



136 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

analogy between the sea and the air, and from a con- 
fusion between the military possibilities of two distinct 
elements. It is really a question of physics, and the 
confusion is profound, because so long as the specific 
gravity of water remains eight hundred times as great 
as that of air, there can be no analogy between sea- 
power and air-power, and no comparison between the 
risks involved in the loss of command of the sea and 
those incurred by lack of command of the air. 

The point requires some amplification. Conquest 
is largely a matter of weight. Apart from the doubt- 
ful possibility of starving a great Continental country 
into submission, you cannot hope to conquer it nowa- 
days unless you can transport on to its territory a 
million tons of human and other material. Transport 
on such a scale is easier over land than over sea, and 
that is one of the causes of insular security. It is im- 
possible in the air, and the absence of air-power must 
remain a trifling disadvantage compared with absence 
of sea-power. Sea-power depends upon the specific 
gravity of water ; ironclads can only float because air 
is lighter than water. But, air being lighter than 
water, an ironclad can, barring accidents, float for an 
indefinite period. INIerely to float costs it no effort 
and requires no artificial aid ; and the enormous dis- 
proportion between the weight of air and the weight 
of water enables a ship to carry tens of thousands of 
tons. Aircraft, on the other hand, require artificial 
inspiration or propulsion to keep them up at all, and 
their lifting capacity is confined to narrow limits by 
the lightness of the element in which they move. A 
super-Dreadnought can carry ten 15-in. guns and a 
crew of 1000 men, in addition to armour-plate weigh- 



BAS GREAT BRITAIN CEASED TO BE AN ISlANt)? U1 

ing thousands of tons, while a Hner can transport thou- 
sands of troops at a time. A ZeppeUn the same size as 
a Hner would require a hundred voyages to transport 
the troops a liner carries on one ; it is practically un- 
protected, and no conceivable airship could lift a really 
heavy gun. What hfting power a Zeppelm possesses 
is only purchased by an expanse of unprotected sur- 
face which condemns its crew to nocturnal raids and 
to altitudes in which accurate aim is not a possibility. 
Aeroplanes are more precise ; but wars cannot be won 
by an arm which cannot stand fire, transport troops, 
artillery, and equipment, or mamtain communications. 
It is hardly more rational to contend that the dropping 
of bombs from Zeppelins and aeroplanes has made 
England part of the Continent than it would be to 
deny our insularity on the ground that we are visited 
by thunderstorms from France. 

The sea does not, of course, protect us from air- 
attacks ; and inasmuch as liability to air-attack is a 
risk we run in common with Continental countries, 
it might be said that we are to that extent a partner 
with the Continent. But it is not Germany's aircraft 
which have occupied French territory and conquered 
most of Belgium ; it is German troops and heavy 
guns, and France and Belgium would pay a heavy 
price to gain our insular security which we say is non- 
existent. Moreover, the sea is no protection in itself ; 
if it shields us from field howitzers, it exposes our 
coasts to the fire of naval guns. Switzerland is pro- 
tected, but we are not, from naval attack. In spite 
of German whimpers,* the sea is perfectly neutral, and 
the German fleet need violate no neutrality in order 
to launch an attack on British shores. It is not the 



138 THE COMMON tVEALTH AT WAR 

sea, but our command of the sea, that bars the way 
and makes us an island in the metaphorical sense. 
Great Britain is saved from invasion by her Navy, 
and not by Nature ; but it is Nature which saves all 
countries from conquest by Zeppelins. 

It is true that Nature has made self-defence an 
easier task for islanders girt by the encircling sea. 
But the properties of the circumambient air afford 
still greater security against aerial conquest. The 
simple truth is that man is a mundane animal ; he is 
tied to the earth by specific gravity, and his command 
over land, sea, and air is conditioned by that fact. 
Command of the sea is not on the same plane as com- 
mand of the land, and command of the air is a still 
more rarefied form of authority. We cannot avoid 
confusion if we conceive them as being analogous. 
We may sing " Britannia rules the waves," but we 
know that she rules them in a very different sense 
from her rule over British territory ; and no one can 
rule the air even in the limited sense in which Bri- 
tannia rules the waves. No one denies that aircraft 
have a value as scouts and as engines of destruction ; 
but that value is not comparable with the value of 
army corps or Dreadnoughts ; and our fear that air- 
craft have abolished our island protection is more pre- 
posterous than the German pretence that submarines 
have destroyed our command of the sea. 

In a very different sense it might be said ^\ith 
greater truth that Britain has ceased to be an island 
and has become a part of Europe ; and we might 
point to our 5,000,000 army and our conscription as 
proof of absorption into the Continental system. But 
that has not been the work of German aircraft ; it has 



HAS GREAT BRITAIN CEASED TO BE AN ISLAND? 159 

been due to deliberate surrender of our '• splendid 
isolation," to the expansion of our insular ideas of our 
duty to our neighbour and of our responsibility for 
the liberties of Httle nations and the humanity of man. 
It is Germany's grievance that we would not leave 
the Continent alone. We have all of us accepted 
Mr. Asquith's definition of our objects in this war, 
but there is not a word in it about self-defence or in- 
sular security, and the distribution of forces on the 
Western Front suggests an invasion of the Continent 
by the British Empire rather than an invasion of the 
British Empire by the Continent. We have become 
part of the Continent because we have made common 
cause with the Continent. If the Narrow Seas have 
been abohshed, it is we and not the Germans who 
have abolished them. They have been abohshed by 
British ships and not by German aircraft ; and they 
have been abolished, not because our island defence 
was insufficient, but because we have cast away the 
self-sufficiency of our insular notions of hberty, and 
in a conflict of nations are seeking to lay the founda- 
tions of international right. 



X. 

THE DEATH-GRAPPLE WITH PRUSSIAN 
MILITARISM.^ 

The speech which Mr. Asquith recently addressed to 
a gathering of French visitors in London provides a 
suitable text for a re^dew of British aims and ideals in 
the war on the completion of its second year. In it 
he reminded his hearers of that definition of British 
policy to which he gave utterance in the first month 
of the war ; but on this occasion he confined his 
remarks to emphasizing the point that all the other 
objects of the war were comprehended in the single 
aim of destroying " the overmastering dictation of a 
Government controlled by a military caste ". 

It would obviously be irrational to father on this 
German issue between popular self-government and 
military dictation the whole burden of European 
problems which are involved in this war. Neverthe- 
less, it is true that the method of their solution, the 
arming of Europe during the last half-centiuy, and 
the final cataclysm of Armageddon have been the 
outcome of German domestic politics, and trace their 
pedigree to the events of 1863-1866.'^ Not one of 

1 Written in April, 1916 ; reprinted from " The Yale Review," 
October, 1916. The title and the I'eference to the completion of 
tlie second year of the war were supplied by the Editor. 

2 The first part of this article, as written, had summarized an 

attempt I made in a course of lectui'es in Lent Term, 1916, to show 

that in German domestic politics lay the ultimate causes of the war. 

140 



DEATH-GRAPPLE WITH PRUSSIAN MILITARISM 141 

those problems is new, but they had not before led to 
a world war because no State before modern Germany 
had adopted the gospel that war is the sole and sove- 
reign method of settling thorny questions. It is that 
doctrine of arms which has made this war, and a 
peace that is to last can only be made by the defeat 
of that doctrine and the conversion of its adherents to 
a more rational frame of mind. The European and 
the German problems are not distmct, but identical ; 
and this war is as much the outcome of German 
politics as the wars of a century ago were the out- 
come of the French Revolution. Then war arose 
from the claim of a people to govern itself ; now it 
has sprung from the claim of a dynasty and a caste to 
rule by the sword. But a Germanic system that has 
lasted less than fifty years is not yet in possession of 
a title to perpetuity ; and the continuance of Prussian 
militarism vdth its philosophical appanages depends 
upon whether this war will have cost the German 
people more than the value they set on its services 
in the past. 

So long as the war promised to end in a German 
victory, this question of cost hardly arose in the 
German mind. The Germans were well imbued with 
the doctrine that their idol the State required human 
sacrifice, and they were always prepared to offer their 
Hves in great numbers for the sake of power and 
glory ; they were willing to make a million martyrs 
to the cause of German supremacy. As for the 
money, their humbled foes would pay in full measure. 
But what if the power and glory eluded their grasp, 
if the indemnities came from German pockets, and 
the millions of lives were offered for naught ? Most 



142 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

races have had their barbarian Molochs and dethroned 
them at length ; and since Verdun miUions of Ger- 
mans have begun at last to think of counting the cost 
of a gigantic and unsuccessful war. To whom will 
they seek to present the bill they will have to pay, 
and to what cause will they ascribe its colossal pro- 
portions and the fact that they have to pay it ? 
Hardly to lack of preparation, self-sacrifice, organiza- 
tion, and effort, assuredly to some original sin in their 
Weltanschauung ; and we may see such a conversion 
from faith in material to belief in moral values as the 
world has rarely witnessed. 

Pending that alluring consummation, we have to 
consider alternative issues to the war, and contem- 
plate the evils we are fighting to avoid. The worst 
eventuality that has faced us since August, 1914, 
may perhaps without undue optimism be ruled out 
of the account ; and before the attack on Verdmi 
German officers themselves admitted in conversation 
that a triumph, such as that of which they had 
dreamt at the opening of the war, was no longer 
within the sphere of rational aspiration. In those 
early days Hans Delbrlick ventured to remark that 
the era of world empires had passed away ; he was 
promptly reminded by the militarists that the terms 
of peace would be settled by the German General 
Staff and not by professors of history. By this time 
even his critics would probably admit that history was 
justified of its professors, and that the dream of a 
Germany surrounded by client European States and 
bestriding the world like a colossus has vanished like 
the unsubstantial fabric of a vision. The Balkans 
dropped out of a recent survey the German Chan- 



DEATH-GRAPPLE WITH PRUSSIAN MILITARISM 143 

cellor made of the field of stricken foes ; nothing was 
said about the disruption of France or the freedom 
of the seas : Belgium was to be created anew mth 
guarantees for the protection of Belgians against 
French and British tyi-anny and of the Flemings 
against the tyranny of Belgium ; and German com- 
pensation was to be found in Poland and in Russia's 
Baltic provinces. This was a public confession of the 
secret conviction that Germany might have to be 
content with something hke the status quo ante 
helium, with a rectification of her Eastern frontier to 
be paid for by the Turkish surrender of Armenia to 
Russia. Germans have tried to prepare their Turkish 
ally for that sacrifice by making little secret of the 
extent of the Armenian massacres. 

Moderate though such a settlement might seem 
compared with German ambitions and Allied appre- 
hensions, it would yet involve consequences wliich 
would be intolerable to humanity at large. This is 
not a war for the re-distribution of territory or the 
compromise of national aspirations ; it is a war to 
end war for generations or to make it more horrible 
and insistent. Lord Rosebery once remarked of the 
liquor traffic that either the State must control the 
trade, or the trade would control the State ; and 
the lesson of this war is that either humanity must 
master war or war will master humanity. The broad- 
est issue in human affairs is whether they are to stand 
on a basis of force and fraud or on one of ethical 
principle ; and this war will decide whether the world 
as a whole will have for the future to put its trust in 
the sword or in justice and humanity, whether man- 
kind will rely on military or on moral strength. A 



144 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

stalemate would be a drawn battle between the two 
principles, and each would be left to develop along its 
own lines. With their usual forethought, the Ger- 
mans began to prepare for this contingency as soon 
as the battle of the Marne made a complete triumph 
unlikely ; and by instilling the conviction into Ger- 
man minds that the war which they made was purely 
one of defence, they will be able to claim that the 
status quo ante helium is a triumph over aggression 
which only the strong right arm of Prussian militarism 
could have achieved. The moral will be to strengthen 
and lengthen that arm, to give yet more weight to the 
councils of war, and pile to a still greater height the 
mountain of munitions and armaments, to pay less 
regard than ever to scraps of paper, and strain every 
nerve to prepare for the final triumph which eluded 
the grasp of militarism in this war.^ 

In that interval the science and horror of war will 
not stand still, and its capacious maw will open yet 
wider to swallow the safeguards and guarantees with 
which international law and morality have painfully 
striven to limit its ravages. The descent we have 
witnessed since 1870 will be but a step compared with 
the abyss into which we shall plunge before war is 
renewed ; and he would be a purblind optimist who 
could discern any sure check or bounds to its opera- 
tions. Before 1914 we imagined that there were 
certain considerable restraints on hostilities hallowed 
by custom and sanctioned by international agreements. 

^ The argument here anticipated has since been developed at 
some length in the German militarist press ; see, for instance, an 
article by Professor Eltzbacher in Das grossere Deutschland for X 
Sept., 1917. 



DEATH-GRAPPLE WITH PRUSSIAN MILITARISM 145 

It was supposed that war was a business confined 
to one sex, to belligerents, and to armed forces ; 
it was assumed that States might remain neutral 
if they chose, and that if they remained neutral their 
nationals would be immune from loss of life and 
destruction of property. It was further taken for 
granted that the number of actual combatants would 
be a smaU proportion of the peoples involved in the 
war, and that loss of Hfe and destruction of property 
would be confined to more or less definite and limited 
military areas. There is not one of these limitations 
which the intruding sweep of this war has not broken 
down, and not one which does not threaten to disap- 
pear altogether in the wars of the future. They will 
not be restricted by sex. The physical strength, which 
was once the combatant's main quahfication, has been 
superseded by machinery ; and the hundred of thou- 
sands of women who have made munitions for this 
war and helped to construct aeroplanes, guns, and 
torpedoes, will be succeeded by a generation of women 
who will switch on the currents to set them in action. 
They may be kept out of the trenches, but there are 
few other functions in war which women might not 
discharge. No doubt their proximity to the fi'ont 
would divert them from industrial production ; but 
science has multiplied the human capacity for pro- 
duction to such an extent that the time may not be 
far distant when a third of the human race could 
produce for the whole and leave the remaining two- 
thirds free to devote their whole time to war. The 
progress towards universal conscription in every State 
is merely a stage in the tendency to involve the whole 
human race in war. 

10 



146 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

There will be no territorial limits to the war of the 
future, and distance will provide no prophylactic 
against the anniliilation of space. The war area is a 
definition of the past, and the Germans who com- 
plained that Freiburg — when it was bombed by the 
French — was outside the sphere of military operations, 
have already dropped bombs on London ; and women 
and cliildren Hving almost on the borders of Wales 
have been killed by Zeppehn raiders coming from 
central Europe. Ten years ago Count Zeppelin was 
laboriously seeking to construct a lighter-than-air ship 
which would travel a few dozen miles at eighteen miles 
an hour : ten years hence it will be as easy for airships 
from Europe to drop bombs on the Mississippi V alley. 
Submarines can now cross the Atlantic ; ^ ten years 
hence they will circumnavigate the globe, and if 
England were beaten in this war, the terms of peace 
would include the cession of the Bermudas, at least 
one West Indian Island withm easy reach of the 
Panama Canal, and a chain of stations across the 
Pacific. Science, which is depriving Great Britain of 
her insular security, wiU not long leave America in its 
paradise of isolation. 

As the distinction between military and ci\dl areas, 
between combatants and non-combatants, is breaking 
down, so also the line which protected neutrals is 
tending to disappear, and in the future it will become 
more and more difficult for neutrals to maintain neu- 
trality. Scraps of paper will clearly be nothing more, 
but that is not the point. If two years ago a seer had 

^This sentence was written as a prophecy in April, 1916; its 
fulfilment by the " Deutschland " in July necessitated an editorial 
emendation in an article not published till October. 



DEATH-GRAPPLE WITH PRUSSIAN MILITARISM 147 

produced a prophetic list of the outrages inflicted on 
neutrals during this war by the deliberate sinking of 
unarmed ships, slaughter of non-belligerent nationals, 
plotting the destruction of property in friendly States, 
and had foretold that one and all of these neutral 
nations would stomach these affronts and clutch at 
every straw to save them from the risk of exacting 
reparation, he would not merely have been disbelieved, 
but condemned as a base detractor of national honour 
and self-respect. If neutraUty has been maintained, 
it is only by means of the hoiTor with which the 
Germans have invested the practice of war, and be- 
cause their calculated Schrecklichkeit has raised the 
price which neutrals are wiUing to pay for peace. 
We Englishmen in our innocence thought that such 
conduct would antagonize humanity and provoke a 
revolt of the world's conscience that would crush the 
offenders. The Germans gauged poor human nature 
with greater precision and cynicism ; and their careful 
barbarity has cunningly debased the currency of inter- 
national relations in war as well as in peace. Between 
one nation and another, said ^^on Billow before the 
war, the relation must always be that of hammer and 
anvil ; there is no room for comity in a world with 
Germans let loose. 

We are fighting against that blood-red future. In 
a sense it is a question of self-defence, but that seK is 
a self which has been expanded until it embraces not 
merely the British Empire and its AlUes, be they 
great or little nations, but the whole of humanity, 
including the Germans themselves ; for they, too, mil 
be saved by their own defeat from a repetition of the 
ills they endure and others to come from this war. We 

10* 



148 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

talk of crushing Prussian militarism, and some of us 
look to that as a penalty for Germany's crimes. It 
is not a penalty but a boon of great price. For fifty 
years the German people have toiled to maintain an 
invincible army, diverted time and energy from produc- 
tion to conscript service, paid hundreds of millions in 
taxes, and surrendered their claims to self-government, 
only in the end to be brought to this war. Defeat 
will release them as well as the rest of Europe from 
the greatest incubus man has ever imposed on the 
backs of his fellow-men. No sane Briton in his saner 
moments thinks of crushing the German people. Pains 
they will have to suffer, because of the pains they in- 
flicted on imiocent people ; but apart from the re- 
dress of French grievances in Alsace-Lorraine, Danish 
grievances in Schleswig, and Polish grievances in 
Posen, German lands will be left to the German people, 
and, we may hope, on a better security than they have 
ever possessed before. Human interests and human 
justice and moral necessity require that heathen trust 
" in reeking tube and iron shard " should be broken, 
and that contempt for plighted troth and sacred 
treaties should be punished. But the same high duty 
requires the Allies to endow German territory and 
German nationality with a stronger safeguard than 
the sword ; and the fitting consummation of this war 
and of the principles for which it was fought would be 
for the Allies, after beating the German swords into 
ploughshares and their spears into priming-hooks, to 
guarantee German territory by an international treaty, 
at the head of which should stand the name of Albert, 
King of the Belgians. To depend on a scrap of 
paper is an adequate penance for those who have 
drawn the sword. 



XL 

THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL 
PARLIAMENT/ 

In an address to his constituents some four months 
ago the Prime Minister respectfully commended to 
the consideration of his fellow-countrymen the problem 
of the future constitutional relations between the 
Mother Country and the Oversea Dominions of the 
Crown. The discussion of a mere problem of politics 
would not become an academic occasion like this, but 
there can be no impropriety in turning the attention 
of a university audience to the purely historical 
question, upon the answer to which must depend our 
efforts to solve and our success in solving the practical 
problem. To what extent have peoples been able 
consciously to mould their own institutions and to 
fashion their future ? How far have those institutions 
been the outcome of unconscious or unwilling adapta- 
tion to an environment over which we have had a very 
imperfect control ? " Human institutions," we have 
been told on what should be good authority,^ " do not 
grow ; they are made by human will for the realization 
of human purposes." On that faith in man as the 

^The Creighton Lecture delivered before the University of 

London on 19 October, 1916; reprinted from "History," October, 

1916. A few verbal alterations made in delivery, after the lecture 

was in type, have been incorporated here. 

2 "The Times Lit. Suppl.," 25 May, 1916, p. 242. 

149 



150 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

conscious creator of his own political universe is based 
the confidence with which we are planning to build 
an Imperial Parliament after the war ; and the bear- 
ing of that antithesis between growth and manufac- 
ture upon the past and future of our Parhamentary 
institutions is the subject of my discourse. 

We need not, perhaps, delay over the terminologi- 
cal objection that institutions do not grow because 
they do not grow like a tree ; and in dealing with 
human affairs we may assume the propriety of speak- 
ing of the growth of a Parliament in power and au- 
thority or of an individual in wisdom and grace, even 
though that growth is invisible to the eye and cannot 
be measured in metres or described in terms of the 
three dimensions. Nor can we avoid the antithesis 
between human growth and manufacture by recourse 
to a theory of divine institution. An ex-President of 
the United States of America has, indeed, described 
the constitution of his country as " the greatest God 
has ever made " ; but he was speaking with a con- 
servative bias in the heat of a Presidential election, 
and if he had paused to reflect on the amendments 
which the American people have been constrained to 
make in this work of the Almighty, he might have 
been more cautious in claiming divine responsibility 
for the original. There is also a story of a hill tribe 
in India being discovered in the act of sacrificing to a 
deity which it called the Privy Council ; but what- 
ever faith we may have had in the divine right of 
kings, we are not, and we never have been, impressed 
with the divinity of Parliament. It is a very human 
institution, and it has either been consciously designed 
by! succeeding generations of English statesmen, or it 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 151 

has grown through a prolonged and complex process 
of natural selection and adaptation to changing cir- 
cumstance. The issue is one between human design 
and human evolution. If our forefathers consciously 
created, first an English, and then a British, Parlia- 
ment to meet the needs of the people of these islands, 
we can hope by conscious effort to create a new Im- 
perial Parliament to satisfy the wider claims of a 
British Empire. If, on the other hand, Parliament 
as it exists to-day was never designed or created by 
any conscious volition, then the argument in favour 
of the possibihty of a new and special creation loses 
some of its force. That does not affect our apprecia- 
tion of the need for a closer constitutional union be- 
tween the realms of the British Crown. Upon that 
there is httle difference of opinion ; but it does affect 
our view of the methods and means whereby that end 
may be achieved. 

Incidentally, the argument involves our whole con- 
ception of history and of the rise and decline of human 
societies. Institutions are the outcome of a people's 
growth, and they cannot be treated apart from the 
political, social, religious, intellectual, and economic 
development of nations. No pastoral community, and 
no community that was purely agricultural, ever pos- 
sessed a Parliament ; Parliaments have only been de- 
veloped by peoples which have attained to an advanced 
stage of social and economic growth. Yet it is diffi- 
cult ,to ascribe these indispensable social conditions 
to conscious human design or volition. Free will 
is a qualified attribute of the individual ; it is a far 
more doubtful factor m a people. An Imperial 
Parliament may be the outcome of this war ; but the 



/ 



152 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

war was none of our making, and the British Empire 
might thus owe its unification to the German Emperor. 
That assuredly was not his intention ; and it does not 
follow that because an institution has been the result 
of human action it is therefore the result of human 
design. Neither as an individual, nor as a society, 
nor as a race is man a free agent. No human slate 
was ever clean, and doubts of the competence of con- 
scious human will to manufacture political organisms 
are inseparable from any sense of the profound influ- 
ence of past inheritance and present environment upon 
the course of human affairs. The character, the in- 
tellect, and the will-power we possess as individuals 
are not the result of our o^ii voUtion, and the person 
who thinks that our national heritage of Liberty and 
Empire is the simple product of national wdll camiot 
have thought to much purpose. Nor would that 
violent assumption carry us very far in our investiga- 
tion ; it would merely land us in another historical 
puzzle. Granted that our national will created our 
national Parliament, how did we come by that national 
vfiM ? We do not believe nowadays that Britain arose 
from the waves with Magna Carta in its bosom, and 
that the Englishman was endowed by a special dis- 
pensation with a natural thirst for a Parliamentary 
vote. Racially, the Englishman is something of a 
cross between the Teuton and the Celt, and neither 
of these races has shown in history any particular 
genius for Parliamentary institutions. We cannot 
account for the British Parliament by tracing it back 
to an aboriginal mstinct. 

Precluded from that explanation, we turned to a 
faith in a founder, and we ascribed our constitution to 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 153 

the beneficent foresight of an Alfred the Great, a 
Simon de Montfort, or an Edward I. Parhament be- 
came, in that view, the sum total of the constitutional 
achievements of a succession of Parliamentary states- 
men ; it was made, not by the national will, but by a 
line of supermen so superior to the common infirmities 
of that genus that they deliberately planned the super- 
session of the superman by the rule of law and the 
dominance of majorities. This theory represents the 
heroic age of historiography : it is easier for the adol- 
escent mind to visualize a hero than a society, a 
creative act than a process of evolution ; and pictures 
of Parliament-making belong to the cinematograph 
view of history. These brilliant achievements of 
heroes and statesmen fade into a soberer picture of 
growth, and we no longer believe that Alfred the 
Great founded our greatness, from universities down 
to the shire system and trial by jury. We have learnt, 
for instance, that trial by jury was not Anglo-Saxon 
at all, that it took many centuries to grow, that in its 
original form of the inquest on oath it was not a popu- 
lar institution designed to protect the liberty of the 
subject, but a royal expedient introduced from abroad 
in the interests of the Treasury. It was first imposed 
on England by William the Conqueror for the pur- 
poses of his Doomsday Survey, and it was about as 
popular as a more modern inquisition known as Form 
IV. So, too, Henry II developed our judicial system, 
not for the sake of justice, but for the rewards or fines 
which justice brought into the royal exchequer. Jus- 
titia magnum emolumentum. If he could have looked 
into the future and seen the uses to which his expe- 
dients would be put in later ages, he would have 



154 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

regarded the results as a monument of the irony of 
history and the perversity of fate. 

What is true of our courts of law is also true of 
Parhament and the Crow^i. Where there has been 
design it has been changed almost beyond recognition 
by subsequent growth and use ; and specific acts of 
creation have become wellnigh as obsolete in the 
science of history as in that of geology. None of the 
great elements in our Constitution were deliberately 
made. The sovereignty of Parliament is itself a 
growth ; that is why it exists, for a sovereignty that 
is created is a contradiction m terms. The power that 
gives can also take away. No one established the 
Monarchy or endowed the Crown mth the preroga- 
tives it enjoys and jurisdiction it exerts. No one 
created the British Parliament or designed either the 
House of Lords or the House of Commons. No 
legislator drafted our common law or enacted the cus- 
tom of the Constitution. No Act of Parhament or 
of the Crown set up the Cabinet system or made the 
office of Prime Minister. Responsible self-govern- 
ment is itself a matter of gro^vth, and you may search 
the laws of the Empire in vain for a statute to the 
effect that any British realm shall be governed by 
Ministers responsible to an elected legislature. Here 
under the British Constitution we live and move and 
have our political being, just as we have our social 
being, not because any king or Parliament has con- 
ferred upon us liberty or empire, but because those 
things have emanated from the conflicting interests, 
ideals, and action of the community, operating through 
centuries of political intercourse and strife, and adapt- 
ing its constitutional forms by tentative and experi- 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 155 

mental stages to the changing conditions of its 
existence. Other constitutions have been made and 
imposed by a conscious effort of will : ours does not 
represent the design or volition of any sovereign, any 
statesman, any party, or any Parliament past or 
present. Monarchs and Ministers, Lords and Com- 
mons, Whigs and Tories, have all contributed to the 
result ; but it is a fact, for which we may all be im- 
partially grateful, that no party ever realized more 
than a fragment of its programme. We have fed in 
the course of our history on varied poUtical fare, and 
our gro^vth has been due to remarkable powers of as- 
similation ; but the political physiology which shall 
teach us the principles of political 'digestion is still a 
sealed book. When it is opened it may be found to 
contain but few of the prescriptions of our constitu- 
tional practitioners. Nature is the first of humanity's 
doctors ; men and women were born before there was 
medical science to usher them into the world, and 
human institutions grew before political science set 
out to teach us how to make them. I would not deny 
the value of political any more than that of medical 
science ; but the physician does not ignore nature, and 
the student of human institutions must needs take 
account of the human nature in politics, and restrain 
his creative ambitions within the limits imposed by 
historical growth. 

The history of our Parliament is a record of 
human action in which human design has played an 
almost insignificant part. Its founders, if it can be 
said to have had any founders at all, were uncon- 
scious of their foundations. If we had to select one 
individual to whom Parliamentary institutions owe 



156 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

more than to any other, it would not be Simon de 
Montfort or Edward I, but a monarch to whom both 
the name of ParUament and the idea of representative 
government were unknown ; and our choice might 
fall on that Henry II, who, through his organization 
of the royal system of justice, provided the means for 
the growth of English common law and encouraged 
all sorts and conditions of men to seek at Westmin- 
ster a redress for grievances which they could not get 
remedied in their local or feudal courts. For we 
shall never understand our Parliament or our Consti- 
tution unless we grasp the fact that Parliament was 
primarily a court of law, and remains to this day the 
highest court in the British Isles. It is still called the 
High Court of ParHament, and we can trace sub- 
stance behind the shadow of the name in the circum- 
stances that the highest judge in the land also presides 
in Parliament ; that the judges sitting as a Supreme 
Court of Appeal in the House of Lords are but a 
section of Parliament fulfilling a part of its functions ; 
and that an Act of Parliament is, ipso facto, due pro- 
cess of law, which may be interpreted but cannot be 
challenged in any lower court. We sometimes com- 
plain of our lawyer-politicians ; but the connexion is 
coeval with Parliament and essential to its existence, 
for politics are inchoate law, and law is crystallized 
politics. Parliament grew out of our common law ; 
and if we are to have a common Parliament and 
common politics for our imperial community, we shall 
^ need for it a broader basis of common Imperial law. 
It may be that, just as the judges of Henry II's Curia 
Regis worked out their law in practical administration 
and then by their judicial circuits and assizes spread 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 157 

that practice throughout the kingdom and made it 
the common law of England, so the Judicial Com- 
mittee of the Privy Council may hammer out a com- 
mon law of the Empire and spread it by means of 
Imperial circuits to the uttermost parts of the King's 
dominions. 

In any case, it was the making of common law 
and the provision of a common resort for plaintiffs at 
Westminster that led to the growth of Parliament. 
In ParHaments, says the earliest description of them, 
which dates from the reign of Edward I, "judicial 
doubts are determined, new remedies are established 
for new wrongs, and justice is done to every one 
according to his deserts " ; and the necessary pre- 
liminary to a mediaeval Parliament was a pubhc pro- 
clamation in Westminster Hall inviting all who had 
grievances to be redressed to present their petitions 
by a certain date. For a century between the days 
of Henry II and those of Edward I, this judicial 
machinery had been growing ; and there are other 
facts which discount Edward's claim to be the founder 
of our Parliamentary system. There is no evidence 
that he ever dreamt of creating an elected legislative 
assembly. He was a great legislator ; but his legisla- 
tion was enacted in Council, and it does not appear 
that his so-called Model Parliament legislated at all. 
His services to the cause of Parhamentary develop- 
ment were for the most part undesigned. He did, 
indeed, Hke other monarchs of his time, summon 
elected representatives from the counties and boroughs 
to give the assent of their constituents to the taxes 
he wanted to levy. The difference between his 
expedient and those of his foreign contemporaries 



158 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

was that Edward I amalgamated the elected tax- 
granting body of representatives with the High Court 
of Parliament ; whereas in France, for instance, the 
Estates-General, or representative assembly, remained 
distinct from the pmdement or court of law. When 
we remember that in England alone did medieeval 
representative government survive to modern times, 
it is hard to overestimate the importance of this 
English amalgamation of representative estates with 
the High Court of Parliament. 

But it may have been accidental, and its impor- 
tance depended upon the use that was made of the 
circumstance by later generations. The folk who 
came to Westminster at Edward's summons or in- 
vitation came to gi-ant taxes or to seek judicial redress 
for their personal grievances. They did not come to 
legislate for the community, and their petitions were 
of a purely local or indi^ddual character ; among the 
thousands that survive for Edward's reign there has 
not been found one for what we should call a general 
public act. Members were locally minded, with httle 
national consciousness ; and so long as their petitions 
reflected this characteristic, Parliament remained a 
court of law. For an individual grievance is a matter 
for judicial redress ; a general grievance becomes a 
question of politics. The evolution of law into 
politics and of Parliament into a legislature was 
brought about by the transformation of the local and 
private petitions of individual members into the com- 
mon petitions of Parliament. Summoned reluctantly 
to the court at Westminster to vote taxation, mem- 
bers began by degrees to compare the petitions for 
redress with which they had been entrusted by their 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 159 

respective constituencies ; and they discovered that 
there was much in common between them, that king's 
Ministers and local magnates used and abused their 
authority in much the same way all over the kingdom. 
It then occurred to some unknown political genius, 
who almost deserves the title of founder of the House 
of Commons, that a speedier and more expeditious 
means of redress would be to pool their common 
grievances, embody them in a common petition, and 
back that petition with their united powers of taxa- 
tion, instead of leaving each petitioner and each con- 
stituency to struggle as it might with the law's delays 
and the king's perversity. And so we find beginning, 
in the reign of Edward II, those common petitions 
which grew into the public Bills of the House of 
Commons, made it in time the predominant organ of 
legislation, and gave it still later control over the 
whole executive government. These are powers 
which grew with exercise, but were not made or 
conferred. Strictly speaking, the House of Com- 
mons to-day possesses no right of legislation ; its 
Bills are still in the form of petitions, and the Crown 
alone enacts. The House possesses a right of peti- 
tion and the power of making government impossible 
if those petitions are disregarded. Our point is that 
its powers were the outcome of growth, and not of 
design or manufacture. 

The same is true of the composition of both the 
Houses of Parliament. No one designed either the 
House of Lords or the House of Commons ; and 
both of them grew into what they are in spite of con- 
scious efforts to make them something else. When 
Edward I held a Parliament, the whole assembly met 



l6o THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

in a single chamber. The kernel of the assembly was 
the king's council in Parliament, consisting largely of 
judges, who sat on three or four woolsacks facing one 
another. Outside that charmed square, on the king's 
right sat the spiritual, and on his left the temporal 
peers, while various other " estates," lower clergy, 
knights, citizens, burgesses, stood or knelt at the bar 
opposite the throne. There in open Parliament — 
now concealed behind the modern name of the House 
of Lords — was transacted, as it is to-day, its solemn 
business, its formal opening, the reading of the king's 
speech, the trial of State offenders, the enactment of 
legislation, the prorogumg of a session, or the dissolu- 
tion of a Parliament. But after the declaration of the 
purposes for which they had been summoned, the 
various " estates " — the number three is a historical 
fiction so far as England is concerned — separated to 
discuss the king's demands and their own petitions in 
greater privacy. The lower clergy resorted to Con- 
vocation, and gradually ceased to attend the Parlia- 
ments at all ; the knights of the shire and the town 
representatives continued for some time to deliberate 
apart from one another. That they should ever have 
coalesced is one of the astonishing features in English 
constitutional history. For the knights of the shire 
were lesser barons, and the lesser barons continued in 
other countries to form part of a single estate, the 
noblesse; while the third estate was restricted to 
townsfolk. In England, however, owing to causes 
which are partly obscure and wholly complex, tlie 
lesser barons failed to assert their nobility, made 
common cause with the townsfolk, and with them 
grew into the House of Commons. This amalgama- 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT l6l 

tion and the withdrawal from Parliament of the lesser 
clergy left the king's council and the spiritual and 
temporal peers alone to form what is called the House 
of Lords, though historically that House is the King's 
Great Council in Parliament, and to it are still sum- 
moned such councillors as the Attorney- and Solicitor- 
General, who never think of obeying their writs. It 
is the growth of custom, and not design or specific 
enactment, which has determined alike the form and 
the powers of Parliament. 

Parliament, however, is supreme in our Constitu- 
tion, because it embodies the Executive as well as 
the Legislature ; and we turn for a moment to see 
whether the same preference of growth to manufac- 
ture has marked the development of our administra- 
tion. Once more we seek in vain for any deliberate 
act of creation : no statute established the Cabinet 
system, created the office of Prime Minister, or gave 
Ministers control over the House of Commons or the 
House of Commons control over them. The whole 
idea of connexion between Legislature and Executive 
was anathema to public opinion in the late seven- 
teenth and early eighteenth centuries ; and if we had 
had to wait for specific creation, we should never have 
had responsible self-government at all. Ministers of 
the Crown were then regarded as prime agents of 
Parliamentary corruption : and place-bill after place- 
bill was passed to preserve the purity of the Legisla- 
ture from contact with the Court. No Parliament in 
the eighteenth century could ever have been per- 
suaded to create a Cabinet system by statute : still 
less could it have been induced to make a Prime 

Minister. The term was almost one of abuse ; the 

11 



162 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Premiership was regarded as an obnoxious importa- 
tion from France, and no accusation was more 
warmly repudiated by those who developed the office 
than the charge that they were seeking pre-eminence 
over their colleagues. George Grenville declared 
that Prime Minister was an odious title ; Lord North 
forbade its use in his household ; and a minority in 
the House of Lords, which on this occasion reflected 
public opinion, protested that " a sole, or even a First, 
Minister is an officer unknown to the law of Britain, 
inconsistent with the Constitution of this country, 
and destructive of liberty in any Government what- 
soever ". The English ideal was Ministerial equality 
and that " separation of powers " to which INIontes- 
quieu attributed English liberty ; and any constitu- 
tional theorist or Convention would then have rejected 
what have since become the corner-stones of our 
Constitution. We were saved then, as we may be 
again, by our history and by the difficulty of re-mak- 
ing according to plan a growth with its roots in the 
past. Every generation is wise in its own conceit ; 
but the collective wisdom of the ages proves greater 
than that of the wisest, and it is the climax of pre- 
sumption when a generation thinks itself wise enough 
to bind its successors by fundamental laws and written 
constitutions and to lay upon the future the dead 
hand of the past. 

That sublime confidence in the wisdom of their 
own generation inspired the labours of the fathers of 
the Constitution of the United States, which Americans 
have claimed as the work of the Almighty and English- 
men have held up in these latter days for our imitation. 
But when we are told that our disputes about the in- 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT l63 

terpretation of our own elastic and unwritten Consti- 
tution warn us to learn from the wisdom of our revolted 
colonies, we may also take leave to remember that 
their written Constitution did not save them from the 
bloodiest civil war in history, and that, in spite of all 
amendments, the American Constitution still involves 
the American people in difficulties we should do well 
to avoid. Abraham Lincoln experienced some of 
them ; in the midst of that civil war the term came 
round for a Presidential election. That term was 
irrevocably fixed by the Constitution, and there were 
no means by which it could be extended ; unless there 
were a Presidential election in 1864 there would cease 
to be a President, and Lincoln, if he continued to ex- 
ercise his functions, would become the merest usurper. 
And so, with one half of the nation fighting the other, 
the American people had to endure the added turmoil 
of a disputed Presidential election. Nor are the perils 
of obsolete prescription by any means exhausted. 
The Presidential election takes place in the first 
week of November, but the new President does not 
enter office until March. It is not impossible that 
President Wilson may be defeated ; it is also not 
impossible that a renewal of Germany's submarine 
campaign may between November and March force 
upon the President the choice of peace or war ; and 
the decision of that momentous question might have, 
by the written American Constitution, to be taken by 
a President in whom the American people had passed 
a vote of no confidence. He could not escape the 
dilemma by resignation ; and even if he committed 
suicide he would be succeeded, not by the successful 

candidate, but by the Vice-President nominated four 

11* 



164 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

years before by the discredited party. It may also be 
added that, strictly speaking, the election in November 
is not the election of a President at all ; it is the elec- 
tion of a College of Electors, who in their turn elect 
the President. The design of the American Constitu- 
tion was that this College of Electors should consist 
not merely of the elected, but of the elect of the 
American people, and that their sublimated wisdom 
should result in the calm and dispassionate choice of 
the fittest man for the post. Practice has perverted 
the elect into a body of cyphers with none but a 
mathematical value : so vain it is by the best-laid 
scheme and the wisest design to prescribe wisdom for 
future ages. 

There is one other provision in the American Con- 
stitution which so forcibly illustrates the point under 
discussion that it calls for a brief notice. The Ameri- 
can Federal Constitution, and nearly all the written 
constitutions which the individual States enjoy, lay 
dowTi the maxim that " no one shall be deprived of 
life, liberty, or property without due process of law ". 
It sounds indisputable, and the design was excellent. 
But the American Constitution also makes the most 
rigid distinction and separation between the Legislature 
and the Judiciary. Congress is not a court : its acts 
are not, like acts of the High Court of Parliament, 
" due process of law ". Only the courts in America 
can deprive a man of Hfe, liberty, or property ; and 
they, of course, cannot legislate. Hence for more 
than a century, until the American Constitution was 
amended, the American people could not impose an 
income-tax on themselves, because an income-tax, 
imposed by the Legislature, deprived a man of property 



■ THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT l65 

without due process of law. Similarly, the courts 
have declared invalid legislative acts prohibiting the 
use of the Stars and Stripes for commercial purposes, 
forbidding the payment of wages in kind, compelling 
mine-owners to provide washhouses, defining danger- 
ous trades, and so forth, on the ground that they de- 
prived men of their natural liberty without due process 
of law. Strange, indeed, are the unrehearsed effects 
of constitutional design. 

Even from our own Constitution, where we have 
avoided as far as possible attempts to manufacture 
fundamental law, we can illustrate the havoc which 
written law creates in conflict with historical growth. 
Far back in the reign of Edward I the competence of 
the old county courts was limited to cases involving 
40s. or less. In those days 40s. was equivalent 
perhaps to £100 in modern currency, and the county 
courts had a fairly extensive jurisdiction. But while 
the written law remained, the value of money fell, 
until in the eighteenth century a man, in order to 
recover any but the most trifling debt, had to bring 
a colossal and expensive action before the courts at 
Westminster, and the county courts dwindled from 
being the active centres of local government into 
the pettiest of institutions. Another illustration 
comes home more vividly to-day : in 1662 Parlia- 
ment fixed the pay of a cavalryman at 2s. and that 
of an infantryman at Is. a day. The corresponding 
values at present would be something like 10s. and 5s. 
— the sum, we may note with interest, which it was 
found necessary to pay Colonial troops in the Boer 
War. Again the written law remained while the 
real value fell, and with that fall decUned the social 



166 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

status from which the British Army was recruited ; 
instead of the British private soldier receiving the 
wages of a skilled artisan, he was reduced below the 
level of unskilled labour. It needs no elaboration to 
suggest the difficulties and the humiliations into which 
in modern times we have been led by this domination 
of the dead hand of a written law. An Act of Parlia- 
ment, and still more a wTitten constitution, the better 
adapted it is to one generation, the less it will suit 
another. Bigidity in human affairs and human institu- 
tions tends to become the ligor moi^tis. That which 
is fixed is dead ; it is only by growth and by change 
tliat we live. 

There have, indeed, been occasions on which men 
have apparently succeeded in forestalling the process 
of growth and in consciously making a durable con- 
stitution ; and the union between England and Scot- 
land in 1707 and that between Great Britain and 
Ireland in 1800 have been taken as proving the ease 
with which two or more independent constitutions 
can be fused into a single organic whole. No one 
will dispute the immense importance of the Anglo- 
Scottish union, at any rate ; and to exclude human 
volition from all influence on the development of 
human institutions would reduce man to a blind 
automaton. But it is a legal rather than a historical 
view which regards that Union as the product of a 
single creative Act passed in 1707 ; and we must not 
ignore the conscious efforts that failed. Edward I 
had tried to unite the two realms ; Protector Somerset 
had seen a vision of a united " Great Britain having 
the sea for a wall, mutual love for a garrison, and 
God for defence, whicli in peace should not be ashamed 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 167 

nor in war afraid of any worldly or foreign power ". 
James I had attempted to convert the personal 
union of the two Crowns into a Parliamentary union 
of the two kingdoms ; and Oliver Cromwell had 
brought it to pass at the point of the sword. But 
these conscious efforts at manufacture impeded the 
natural growth of British union ; and even in 1707 
the union was incomplete. Scotland expressed its 
national voice through its kirk rather than through 
its Parliament, to which it was never greatly attached ; 
and it refused to unite its kirk with that of England. 
It also clung to its legal system, and hankered after 
its native dynasty ; and the union of the two Parlia- 
ments was followed by two rebellions. The real 
union between the two realms grew after the Act 
through the decline of theological animus, the unify- 
ing effects of the Industrial Revolution, of the common 
inheritance of dominions and oversea trade, and of the 
common development of responsible self-government 
which Scotland had never enjoyed before 1707. The 
Irish Union, indeed, was made and did not grow ; but 
it would be a strange act of policy to hang round the 
necks of British realms another such union, and con- 
demn them to another century of history such as that 
which elapsed between the rebellion of Robert Emmet 
and the rising of Sinn Fein. 

But nowhere is the contrast between the growth 
and the manufacture of institutions better illustrated 
than in the history of Britain's first self-governing 
Dominion. In 1837, when Queen Victoria ascended 
the throne, there were raging in Canada two rebellions, 
one under Mackenzie in British Ontario, and the other 
under Papineau in French Quebec, and after their 



f68 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

failure Lord Durham was sent out to report on the 
whole situation. He made two principal recommenda- 
tions : (1) That the separate Legislatures for the two 
provinces of Ontario and Quebec should be united in 
a single Canadian Parliament ; and (2) that this united 
province should be governed by Ministers responsible, 
not to Downing Street, but to the Canadian Parha- 
ment. The first of these changes was " made " by 
statute in 1840 ; it proved a failure, and in 1867 
Ontario and Quebec recovered their separate Legis- 
latures. Durham's second change was not " made " ; 
it was left to grow under the hands of successive 
Governors, and it proved a signal success in Canada 
and a model for the government of other British 
Colonies and Dominions. 

All this, it may be urged, is an argument against 
creation by a superior Imperial Parliament for the 
people of the Dominions ; it does not apply to the 
creations of those peoples themselves. The deliberate 
federation of the six Austrahan States and the union 
of the four South African Colonies would, no doubt, 
have been failures had they been simply imposed by 
the British Parhament. But their success proves that 
separate States can federate or unite and make a con- 
stitution for themselves \\dthout waiting for the slow 
and haphazard process of growth. That is un- 
doubtedly true, and if all the Dominions and De- 
pendencies of the British Cro^vn had grown so like 
one another in social development, economic needs, 
and political circumstance as the six Australian States 
or the four South African Colonies, and if they were 
equally anxious to amalgamate, the problem of Im- 
perial Union or Federation would be comparatively 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 1^9 

simple. In each of those two precedents there was 
also contiguity of territory, and, what was more im- 
portant, no great disproportion in size or population. 
It is comparatively easy to unite when union means 
equality ; but men do not like predommant partners. 
That has been the real difficulty in the Irish Act of 
Union ; union meant legislation by Britain for Ire- 
land, and not a joint production. It was the rock on 
which earlier Anglo-Scottish projects of union split. 
" What would you say," asked a Scot of an English 
statesman in discussing the proposal to marry Edward 
VI to Mary, Queen of Scots, " if your lad were a lass, 
and our lass were a lad ? " Husband and wife were, 
according to Roman and also to old English law, one 
person, and that person was the husband. England 
and Scotland would become one kingdom, and that 
kingdom would be English. States will sacrifice some 
of their individuality to a higher and common unity ; 
they will not welcome absorption by a predominant 
partner. ^ 

Apart from the enormous complexities involved 
with regard to India, Egypt, the West Indies, and 
the many Dependencies of the Crown, which enthu- 
siasts would ignore by confining the scope of Imperial 
Union to the self-governing Dominions, the inherent 
difficulty consists in the fact that the total white 
population of all the other Dominions put together is 
less than a third of that of the United Kingdom, and 
that in any Imperial Council or Parliament, based on 
popular representation, the oversea members would be 
outvoted by three to, one. This inconvenience meets 
with a somewhat drastic remedy in a suggestion I 
have seen from an overseas source : it is there pro- 



170 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

posed that out of an Imperial Council of twenty-five 
members, two should come from Newfoundland, three 
from New Zealand, three from South Africa, four 
from Australia, five from Canada, and eight from 
Great Britain. Ireland, with sixteen times the popula- 
tion of Newfoundland and four times that of New 
Zealand, is ignored ; each fortunate Newfoundlander 
is equated with forty-five inhabitants of Great Britain, 
and on an average each oversea Briton is to have the 
voting strength of five mere Englishmen or Scots. 
We need not be wedded to the principle of " one 
vote, one value " to feel some compunction about 
transferring the control of the British Na\'y and Army 
and the issues of peace and war to a council in which 
the representatives of the British Isles would be out- 
voted by more than two to one. 

The control of the issues of peace and war is the 
kernel of the problem, and it carries us to the heart 
of its complexities. The Council or tlie Parliament 
that wages a war must control the supply of men, 
and our existing Government has found it necessary 
to apply conscription to Great Britain. New Zealand 
has followed suit, and Australia is next week to have 
a referendum on Mr. Hughes's Bill ; but his proposal 
falls far short of the British measure. It does not in- 
clude married men, nor only sons, nor bachelors under 
twenty-one, nor those who are supporting dependents ; 
and so far, there has been no suggestion of conscrip- 
tion in South Africa, Canada, or Newfoundland. 
Such anomalies are tolerable in our anomalous Em- 
pire ; they would be impossible under a single Imperial 
Parliament. Dominion representatives could hardly 
impose compulsion on us while exempting their own 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 171 

constituents ; and, on the other hand, no one could 
contemplate with equanimity the prospect of an Im- 
perial Legislature or an Imperial Executive attempt- 
ing to enforce conscription on a Dominion whose 
representatives had voted against it, or trying to levy 
taxation which they had not granted. It is of the 
essence of our Empire as it exists, and of the national 
status claimed by the British realms, that they should 
be free to give or to refuse. They have given lavishly 
of their best ; they could not have given if they had 
no choice. A free community can impose conscrip- 
tion on itself ; it ceases to be a free community or to 
enjoy a national status when conscription or taxation 
can be imposed by others. 

No doubt the case would be altered if we were 
convinced that the Dominions desired to merge their 
individuality in a single Empire-community, and we 
need not assume the impossibility of such a communal 
growth. But it is not a thing we can make, and it is 
well to fix our attention on the actual needs of the 
Empire and the demands of the Dominions. The 
specific demand brought out by the war is clear and 
simple enough, and it has been convincingly put by 
the spokesmen of various British realms. They find 
themselves and those they represent committed to a 
war in the making of which they had no voice ; and 
they suggest with reason and justice that the perpetua- 
tion of such a condition of things might involve a slur 
upon their citizenship of the Empu'e and a strain upon 
their loyalty. But there is no desire, I take it, on the 
part of the Dominions to submit their domestic politics, 
their right of taxing themselves, of fixing their own 
economic and social, educational and ecclesiastical 



1?2 fHE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

policy to the arbitrament of a centralized Parliament 
in which they would all be outvoted. The question 
is purely one of foreign policy ; towards the outside 
world the Empire wishes to stand as a unit ; within 
its bounds its Dominions desire to manage their own 
affairs. That point can be met without recourse to a 
constitutional revolution or summoning a Convention 
of the Empire to abolish all its Parliaments and con- 
struct a new one out of the debris. But it cannot be 
discussed without reference to another issue which 
agitates some of our minds — the question of the 
democratic control of foreign policy. If by Imperial 
control of foreign policy and of the issues of war and 
peace we mean that diplomatic agreements are not to 
be made nor military measures to be concerted with 
foreign Powers until those measures have been sub- 
mitted to half a dozen Parliaments, and possibly to 
general elections or the referendum, that Imperial 
control would seem a distant and impracticable pro- 
ject. Our foreign policy was hampered enough in 
August, 1914, by the necessity of consulting the 
House of Commons, and one could hardly regard 
with enthusiasm the prospect of submitting to half 
a dozen British electorates our relations with Greece 
or its decomponent parts, the future of Poland, of the 
Balkan Peninsula, or of the Turkish Empire, or the 
precise attitude we should adopt towards the varying 
views of our Allies upon those delicate problems. 

We have, indeed, to be content with such indirect 
control of foreign policy as arises from the fact that 
it is determined by men who are responsible to the 
Parliament we elect ; and there is no reason why the 
men wlio determine our foreign policy should not 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 173 

include representatives responsible to the Dominions. 
It required no constitutional revolution, and not even 
an Act of Parliament, to gather Imperial Conferences 
or invite Sir Robert Borden and Mr. Hughes to at- 
tend at Cabinet meetings ; and no Imperial Conven- 
tion is needed to expand those spasmodic occasions 
into the custom of an Imperial Constitution. Nor 
would it need an auto-da-fe of British Parliaments for 
the Crown to summon any number of oversea states- 
men by special writ to the House of Lords, and thus 
convert that ancient assembly once more into the 
King's Great and Imperial Council in Parliament. 
Without any Act of Parliament that House has been 
changed, for judicial purposes, from an unwieldy body 
of peers into an expert body of judges. The Crown 
can summon by special writ whomsoever it chooses ; 
it has even of late reasserted its right of neglecting to 
summon those whose presence was not desired ; and 
with a little courage and discretion the Upper House 
might be made a proper Chamber for the discussion 
and control of Imperial foreign policy. The advantage 
would be that these steps could be taken experimen- 
tally and by degrees. There need be no constitutional 
burning of boats or leaps in the dark ; an unsuccessful 
experiment need not be repeated ; a successful ex- 
pedient might be developed. It was by feeling their 
way that our forefathers led Great Britain along the 
path of constitutional progress and saved their country 
from the precipice of revolution. 

So, too, we might thus recover something of that 
elasticity in our Constitution which the process of 
formulation has tended to impair. Originally Parlia- 
ment meant no more than a " parley " ; and Parlia- 



174 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

merit ary government implied no more than government 
by discussion and consent. In course of time the 
conditions of the parleys and the persons to take part 
were more and more closely defined by custom, law, 
and statute, until Parliament has become a more or 
less rigid body, reacting with ponderous lack of pre- 
cision to the ever-changing conditions of political and 
social life. Of late years the stereotyping of procedure 
in the House of Commons has driven really effective 
discussion, which influences votes and determines the 
fate of measures and men, into the lobbies and smok- 
ing-room ; and Bills have been remodelled in Com- 
mittee not on account of what was said in the House, 
but as the result of parleys beyond its doors. Parlia- 
ment has had to accommodate itself to these exten- 
sions of debate beyond its walls for domestic concerns, 
jand it might well widen its parleys so as to compre- 
hend Imperial deliberations. But the remedy for 
increasing rigidity is not the homoeopathic dose of a 
written constitution ; the spirit of liberty which in- 
forms the British Empire cannot be confined to the 
letter of a law, and the bond of blood and sympathy 
which unites its various realms will not be strengthened 
by conversion into parchment. 

For half a century or more there has been a healthy 
reaction against the doctrine of laissezfaire, and we 
are not in much danger to-day of falling into the 
heresy that the less a Government or a community 
does by corporate action, the better. We should 
rather beware of carrying that reaction to the other 
extreme of believing that our competence to create 
and remodel has left no scope for growth and for the 
play of forces which we cannot control, devise, or fore- 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 175 

see. Men have lived and suffered and died in this 
war to little purpose if we have not learnt from our 
foes to shun the idolatry of the State and the dogma, 
on which that worship is based, that the earth and its 
fullness are man's to make therewithal whatsoever he 
wills. Man has not made himself after a likeness he 
conceived ; no Government planned the British Em- 
pire, and no Convention of peoples drafted its Con- 
stitution. It does not follow that things must needs 
go wrong unless we set them right ; and we have not 
yet established a league for maintaining the law of 
gravitation or a society for promoting regularity in 
the rotation of the earth. Nor need we impale our- 
selves on the dilemma that, unless we make an Im- 
perial Constitution, our Empire will dissolve. It was 
not reft in twain in the eighteenth century because 
we let things grow, but because George III and his 
Ministers, under the impetus of a great and suc- 
cessful war, which had exhibited and increased the 
strength of the Empire, did not leave it to grow, but 
dreamed of reducing to logical form its heterogeneous 
substance. It is good to have our occasional visions 
from Pisgah, but even the mountain-tops of Scripture 
were not without their temptations ; and if from one 
there was caught a glimpse of the Promised Land, 
from another there was unrolled a more seductive and 
delusive prospect. 

To leave our Imperial future to growth and to 
pregnant experience is not to leave it to chance. There 
is no blinder historian than he who maintains that we 
blundered into Empire and became what we are 
through fortuitous circumstance. We need not pre- 
sume that what we do not know is not knowledge ; 



176 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

that effect has not followed from cause because we 
cannot trace the connexion ; that what we have not 
planned is pure accident. It is one of the wisest of 
our constitutional maxims that no Parliament can 
bind its successors ; and the liberty we inherit is free- 
dom from the mortmain of the past. I do not know 
by what title we claim to impose on posterity con- 
stitutional bonds which our forefathers have not im- 
posed upon us, nor why we should think that a system, 
made to our measure, will compass the girth of the 
Empire to be. We see few signs of stagnation, and 
there never has been a political growth less suited by 
nature and circumstance for the deadly finality of a 
code than the British Empire with its infinite grades 
of development and variety of conditions. We might 
learn, moreover, from the Habsburg dominions to-day, 
if we have not learnt it from history, that we cannot 
fuse States into one by statute, convention, or conquest. 
Political unity, like personal happiness, comes not to 
those who seek it, though it may be met on the high- 
way of duty or endeavour. Associations are not made 
for the mere sake of association ; they grow out of a 
common desire to promote a common purpose. Union 
for the sake of union. Empire for the sake of Empire, 
the State for the sake of the State, art for the sake of 
art, life for the sake of life — all are conceptions bred of 
the same confusion of means with the end, of the path 
with the purpose. Essential unity has come in bounti- 
ful measure to British realms in this war, not because 
they sought that unity for itself, but because they 
found it in the pursuit of a common ideal, in tlie 
defence of a common principle ; formal unity may 
come in the course of time, but not because we strive. 



THE GROWTH OF AN IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 177 

to create it. It will grow as the outward sign of an 
inward grace achieved through a communion of ser- 
vice and self-sacrifice for the commonwealth of nations 
and the common weal of man.^ 

^ Replies to this lecture by Prof. Ramsay Muir and Mr, D. O. 
Malcolm were printed in " History " for January, 1917, and a re- 
joinder to them by the author in April, 1917. 



12 



XII. 

THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE.^ 

The trials of war inevitably beget a desire for peace, 
and peace is so fair a thing in herself, and so seductive 
in her moral garb, that it seems almost blasphemy to 
suggest that peace hath her temptations no less insidi- 
ous than war. A tale of sacrifice ever growing in 
length, a hope of victory deferred again and again, the 
delusion that the objects for which we entered upon 
war are already \\dthin our grasp, and the contention 
that the furtlier prosecution of hostilities is merely for 
revenge make an appeal to public sentiment which 
can hardly be ignored ; and Cabinet Ministers are 
being diverted from urgent tasks of administration 
to an oratorical campaign which should be a work of 
supererogation, at least so far as they are concerned. 
It is for them to strengthen the arm which wields the 
sword ; and if the pen be mightier than the sword, it 
is pen that must parry pen. 

The morality of peace is the strongest weapon of 
the pacifist, and there is no assumption more common 
or more confident in that school of thought than that 
the conscientious objector is the superman of pure 

1 "The Times " Literary Supplement, 7 December, 1916 ; Ger- 
many's peace proposals were announced five days later, on 12 
December, and President Wilson's . peace note was published on 

20 December. 

178 



THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE 179 

reason and a paragon of virtue ; if all men reasoned 
as they do there would be no war, and the prevalence 
of war is due to animal instinct and low rationality. 
That, no doubt, is true as an abstract proposition, and 
it is not a mere coincidence that the intellectual pro- 
tagonist of pacifism in England is an expert in the 
field of mathematical abstraction. The more human 
and practical problems of peace and war arise from 
the absence of that universal reason and from the 
active presence of potentates, philosophers, and people 
who beheve in the gospel of war and deny, by precept 
and practice, the premises of the pacifist. Shrewd 
men, even lawyers when divested of wig and gown, 
have maintained that it is wise to suffer almost any 
wrong rather than go to law for right. But the most 
ethical pacifist is constrained. to plead when an action 
is brought against him ; even he cannot let his char- 
acter and his belongings go by default before a litigious 
attack ; and it appears to be illogical and no more 
moral to refuse to defend a suit in the arbitrament of 
war. The doctrine of the absolute sanctity of human life 
might perhaps be pressed into the service of a distinc- 
tion between litigation and war, and the commandment 
to do no murder has been interpreted as an injunction 
not to save others if our own lives are endangered in 
the effort. But most advocates of peace at any price 
shrink from these moral conclusions, and one of them 
has admitted that we were right in resisting the 
Spanish Armada. In point of fact that Armada was 
only dispatched because we had been attacking Philip's 
dominions and assisting his rebelHous subjects in the 
Netherlands ; and the modern pacifist position appears 
to be that the Belgians were justified in opposing 

12 * 



180 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

a hopeless resistance to Germany but we were not 
justified in attempting to make that resistance suc- 
cessful. 

The admission of any justification for war is, how- 
ever, a weak-kneed concession from the point of view 
of the logical pacifist — that is to say, if he is really the 
superman he pretends to be. Many artists, we are 
told, have remained wholly untouched by the passion 
of the war because their creative instinct renders them 
immune from the impulses which make for war and 
death, " and the few men in whom the scientific im- 
pulse is dominant have noticed the rival myths of 
warring groups, and have been led through under- 
standing to neutrality ". It is with the morals of 
pacifism that we are concerned ; and it has often been 
remarked that art is neither moral nor immoral ; it is 
non-moral. The self-concentration of the artist is a 
poor guide for the community of man ; and it was to 
degenerate Cynics that opposition is said to have been 
provoked by their overweening display of superiority. 
Neutrality may also be reached by easier paths than 
by following scientific impulse. There is the broad 
highway of moral cowardice and intellectual indolence. 
If we want to shirk a decision between right and 
wrong and to avoid the sacrifice involved in assisthig 
the one and repressing the other, the readiest and the 
meanest expedient is to proclaim that it is a case of 
six of one and half a dozen of the other, and that the 
war is a conflict of rival myths. Neutrality is for the 
most part a threadbare cloak for individual or national 
selfishness ; and the assertion of the immorality of the 
war is often but a plea to be excused the moral ob- 
ligation of participating in the strife of good and evil. 



THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE 181 

More colourable is the appeal to the sacrifice in- 
volved in the prosecution of the suit, and no one can 
be indifferent to that claim. Nevertheless, it is not 
an appeal to morality. The moral and spiritual pro- 
gress of mankind has only been bought by sacrifice, 
and he is more blessed who gives than he who receives. 
To dilate on the sacrifice with the object of showing 
or suggesting that moral gain is not worth pain is the 
work of the Tempter and not a sign of moral superi- 
ority. A nation's capacity for sacrifice in moral causes 
is the test of its morality. The pacifist, to do him 
justice, is less sceptical of the morality of our motives 
than many fervent advocates of war ; but he thinks 
they might have been attained by other methods, and 
as a variation on this theme he now urges that they 
have been brought within our reach by our success 
upon the Somme. It is here that political ineptitude 
comes to the aid of moral obtuseness. We could 
make, we are told, this winter " a peace which would 
secure the objects for which the British people entered 
the war ; which would secure the complete evacuation 
of Belgium, France, and Serbia ; which would go a 
long way towards establishing the principle of nation- 
ality ; which would defeat all the plans of aggression 
and domination put forward by the Prussian mihtar- 
ists ; which would lay the foundations of a permanent 
partnership for the settlement of international dis- 
putes ". The least fanciful of these exercises of the 
imagination is perhaps the assumption that the Ger- 
mans would purchase peace by the evacuation of 
Belgium, France, and Serbia ; but could there be a 
greater illusion than that this evacuation would secure 
the objects for which the British people entered the 



182 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

war ? Before the war broke out the German Ambas- 
sador in London assured Viscount Grey that Austria 
would take no Serbian territory, to which Viscount 
Grey very naturally repHed that it was easy to reduce 
a State to vassalage without absorbing its territory ; 
and the moderate Germans, who profess to be willing, 
for the sake of peace, to evacuate Belgium, stipulate 
for " material guarantees " that Belgium shall not be 
used as a means for invading Germany. Inasmuch 
as Germany used the guaranteed neutrality of Bel- 
gium as a means of invading France, it is not difficult 
to foresee the interpretation she would put upon the 
material guarantees for her own protection in Belgium. 
But the objects for which the British people 
entered the war have been defined, once and for all, 
by Mr. Asquith. He said we should never sheath the 
sword — not until Belgium was evacuated but — " until 
Belgium recovers in full measure all and more than 
all that she has sacrificed ". Literally, that pledge is 
not capable of fulfilment. Belgium can never recover 
the precious Uves of which the German invader de- 
spoiled her, and Louvain and Ypres can never be what 
they were before the war. But there is still left a 
world of difference between evacuation and the atone- 
ment the Kaiser will have to make with a heart that 
will bleed for other things than Louvain. How would 
mere evacuation repay the hundreds of millions of 
which Belgium has been robbed during German occu- 
pation, the military executions and atrocities, and the 
slavery inflicted on the people ? Nor is justice satis- 
fied by the restitution of stolen property or the resus- 
citation of the victim of a murderous attack. It was 
a rudimentary advance in our primitive jurisprudence 



THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE 183 

when the murderer was required to pay not merely 
the " wer " or price of the man he killed, but the 
" wite " or fine for his offence against the conscience 
of the community. Our ethical pacifists have not yet 
reached that primitive stage of moral development. 
They talk of peace and reconciliation without a 
thought of atonement ; in the name of ethics they de- 
nounce all justice as revenge, and in that of progress 
plead for the status quo ante helium which would leave 
open the door for a repetition of the crime. The 
people that hailed with delight the sinking of the 
" Lusitania," and hate Belgium because of the wrong 
they have done her, must not have to endure the 
humiliation of restraint from future crime. 

The object of justice is not mere retribution, but 
prevention ; and the criminal is sentenced not that he 
may suffer, but that others may be saved. We entered 
this war not merely for German retribution, still less 
to secure the evacuation of Belgium, but for an 
ensample to posterity, for the protection of future 
Naboths and a warning to the Ahabs yet to be. That 
warning and that protection would be rendered of 
none effect by compounding the felony and crying 
quits with the felon ; and we are not impressed by 
the pacifism of the schoolboy who makes an attack on 
his fellow and then, finding himself in difficulties, be- 
gins to cxj pace. The greater the effort required to 
vindicate humanity, the more determined are we that 
it shall not need repetition ; and the more who fall in 
the fight, the stronger their claim that they shaU not 
have died in vain. The only victory commensurate 
with the cost of this war will be a victory over war 
itself; and unless humanity masters war, war will 



184 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

master humanity. But death was not conquered by 
" the impulses which make for hfe," and war will not 
be exorcised by the pacifist's plea. The fight for right 
would be an easy matter if the righteous had the 
choice of weapons ; but in war the aggressor selects 
both the time and the means of attack. The victim 
has, however, only himself to thank if, when he can, 
he fails to disarm his enemy and agrees to a truce be- 
cause his opponent has had enough. The aggressor 
has always had enough when he is reduced to the de- 
fensive ; it is then that he thinks of liberty and begins 
to talk of the claims of humanity. He wdll also en- 
deavour to prove that he only struck first to parry a 
blow, but his motive will be a desire to retain his 
weapons for future action. 

The German Government has been preparing this 
line of defence ever since the failure of its original 
offensive on the Marne, and the implications of its 
argument have escaped those who look for a Prussian 
repentance. If the Entente was the aggressor, and if 
peace is procured by the mere evacuation of conquered 
territory, then these conquests will have been defensive 
in character, and Germany will have been saved from 
disaster by the strong right arm of Prussian militarism. 
The moral that will be impressed on the German 
people will be to lengthen and strengthen that arm. 
... If the war was a German defensive, a peace 
that protects German territory from invasion will be 
a positive triumph for Prussia. Not by such means 
will Europe be rid of the menace of blood and iron. 

Nor is there better foundation for that evidence, 
" derived from a careful study of German opinion," 
upon which are based the hopes of a pacifist German 



THE TEMPTATION OF PEACE 185 

Government ; and those who are disposed to rely upon 
such manifestations would do well to ponder some 
remarks made by Dr. Walther Rathenau, who has 
just been appealing to American public opinion, to a 
French interviewer in 1913 : — 

" Many of the elements in your social and moral 
life [he said] escape us. For instance, we are not, as 
you are, in the habit of reckoning with public opinion. 
With us it does not count for anything. Opinion has 
never had any effect on pohcy. It resembles rather 
the chorus of antiquity which looks on and comments 
on an action unfolding around it. I should compare 
it to a crowd which follows, but is not admitted to 
the game." 

Expressions of German opinion are therefore 
worthless as guarantees for the conduct of German 
Governments, and we have Herr von Bethmann Holl- 
weg's admission that treaties are not more binding. 
Prussia's repentance for the evil she has done will be- 
gin only when her power to do more has ceased ; and 
Mr. Asquith's definition of our objects in the war is 
really redundant, for the restitution to Belgium, the 
securing of France from the menace of aggression, and 
the placing of the rights of the smaller nationalities of 
Europe upon an unassailable foundation are all de- 
pendent upon the complete and final destruction of 
the military domination of Prussia. To represent the 
evacuation of Belgium, France, and Serbia as equiva- 
lent to these objects is as pitiful a perversion of the 
truth as the pretence that the censorship and the De- 
fence of the Realm Acts are suppressing public opinion. 
Neither has any control of the ballot-box, and yet it 
is pacifist prudence rather than pacifist principle that 



186 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

has prevented the pacifists from fighting by-elections 
since the war began, and only the prolongation of 
Parliament enables the members of the party to pose 
as popular representatives. 

The pacifist is not, indeed, the most dangerous 
enemy to the peace which should end this war, and 
some ground for his and neutral apprehension of a 
crushing Entente triumph is provided by those who 
would compromise our cause by converting the fruits 
of the nation's sacrifice to money-making ends. If 
we refuse to make peace with Miss Cavell's murderers, 
with the slave-drivers of Belgium, and with the per- 
petrators and accomplices of the Armenian massacres, 
it is not to make peace for the profit of British mono- 
polists. Even the Pharisees held it unlawful to pay 
into the treasury the price of blood, and the money- 
changers in our temple will not persuade us to defile 
British tombstones in France with epitaphs couched 
in terms of high finance. Whatever the impulse of 
those who hallow that ground, they have not died to 
line our pockets with pelf ; and the terms of the peace 
we make will be the epitaph we shall write on the 
graves of the martyi's of war. Nor, when the fighting 
is over, shall we think it possible to construct a per- 
manent peace out of the passions of war. The profit- 
eer who seeks for tribute in retribution and the paci- 
fist who sees nothing in justice but revenge are our 
rival tempters from the paths that make for peace and 
judgment. It is for us to beware that in that judg- 
ment we do not condemn ourselves and that by that 
peace we do not sentence our children to war. 



XIII. 

IS IT PEACE ? ' 

A YEAR ago the fragile hopes of peace embarked with 
the not very happy band of pilgrims who sailed across 
the Atlantic with Mr. Ford. The Christmas that is 
past found peace on the Hps, if not in the hearts, of 
the great rulers of the world, and how to make peace 
will be the absorbing problem of mankind throughout 
the coming year. It cannot be said that the opening 
moves were auspicious. Germany posed as the victor, 
and assumed as the basis of agreement the brilliant 
but unsubstantial mihtary map with which she fed the 
confidence, but could not feed the stomachs, of her 
people. She wanted a conference which should ad- 
vertise the divergent motives of the Entente Powers 
while she enjoyed the fruits of conquered kingdoms. 

The coincidence, if it was a coincidence, of Presi- 
dent Wilson's Note with Germany's proposal aroused 
suspicions of co-operation, and created some unfortun- 
ate and unfounded feeling. The coincidence in time 
between the Kaiser's and the President's action did 
not necessarily imply a coincidence of method and of 
object ; but the conditions under which diplomacy 
works in our modern days of democracy naturally led 
to an assumption of identity or at least connexion. 

1 Written in January, 1917, for the "Yale Review," but not 

published owing to the ensuing change in the American situation. 

187 



188 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Publicity gives the first word in criticism or reply- 
to the newspapers, and journalists have to think so 
rapidly that they are almost forced to jump to con- 
clusions, while the conclusion to which one jumps is 
always that which comes first to mind. The convic- 
tion that the President's Note was connected with the 
Kaiser's action was a conclusion that could be reached 
without reading, much less pondering, either ; and 
within a few hours millions were persuaded that Mr. 
Wilson was playing the German game.^ Yet it is at 
least a reasonable interpretation that he wished to 
know how Germany proposed to give effect to her 
professions of concern for the liberty of little peoples 
such as Belgium and Serbia, and thus make possible 
American co-operation in that future league of nations 
and peace of the world which Germany is beginning 
to appreciate. After all. Great Britain's intervention 
in the war was determined by the answers she received 
to a corresponding inquiry respecting Belgian neu- 
trality ; and a legitimate factor in determining Presi- 
dent Wilson's future policy would be the reply he 
received about Germany's " guarantees " for the future 
of Antwerp, for instance, or Belgrade, or Warsaw, 
and possibly of Armenia. 

To such an inquiry there can be no objection on 
the part of the Allies. Nor is there any validity in 
another objection which has been raised and is based 
on a false analogy between the present struggle and 
the American Civil War. It is assumed that the 

^ I ventured to protest against this interpretation in a letter 
published in " The Times " on 26 December. The Allies' reply to 
the President was published on 1 1 January, after this article was 
written. 



IS IT PEACE? 189 

Allies are entitled to adopt towards President Wilson's 
intervention the attitude which President Lincoln 
adopted towards Napoleon Ill's offer of mediation, 
and indicated that he would adopt if similar steps were 
taken by Britain. There is, of course, an essential 
difference : Lincoln could not accept mediation with- 
out admitting the independent status of the South, 
and thus giving away the whole constitutional prin- 
ciple on which the war was fought. There is no such 
fatal objection in the present case : no one disputes 
the independent status of the belligerents ; even Ger- 
many has not denied the sovereignty of Belgium, nor 
Austria that of Serbia, and no Entente Power is con- 
cerned to deny that of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, 
or Turkey. Nor are they prepared to deny the right 
of neutrals to offer their services by way of mediation. 
But, while there is no parallel in international law 
between the two sets of circumstances, there are other 
parallels which it would be unwise, in the interests of 
peace and goodwill, to ignore. This war has been 
waged for two years and a half ; it may seem as far 
from an end as ever. But it is no farther from its 
conclusion than the American Civil War seemed to 
neutrals and to many Americans themselves, on the 
eve of Gettysburg or after Chickamauga, when the 
North was still eighteen months from the fall of Rich- 
mond and Lee's surrender. What would history have 
said of Lincoln, if during that interval he had listened, 
not to neutral mediation, but to neutral opinion, and 
made peace by negotiation ? Would the cause of 
humanity have been served by compromise then ? 
We no more expect the Central Empires to take our 
view of the issues now than the Northern States could 



190 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

expect the South to take theu-s in 1863 ; and neutrals 
are just as much at Hberty to-day to balance and dis- 
count the rival professions of virtue as they were fifty 
years ago. But we on our part are as much entitled 
as Lincoln was to believe that the cause of right is no 
less bound up in a fight to a finish than it was in the 
Civil War, and to resist, not on the technical ground 
of international law, but on the broader gi'ounds of the 
future of peace and the welfare of man, any attempt 
to bring this war to an inconclusive end by compromise 
or negotiation. 

The lawfulness of President Wilson's action was 
not, of course, his motive for acting. Apart from an 
addiction to peace on principle and a praiseworthy 
ambition to restore prestige to the United States by 
restoring peace to the world, he naturally desired a 
speedy end to a war which breeds bitterness between 
sections of his own people, involves them, their trade, 
and their communications in manifold inconvenience 
and risk, and might conceivably drag him into the 
vortex of hostilities. At times it almost seems as 
though the President regarded the American people 
as the chief sufferers from the war, or at least as being 
the most ardent and single-minded champions of peace ; 
and this is an attitude lie appears to share with millions 
of supporters in the Middle AVest and West. It 
appeals with special force to those who desire peace 
because they are indifferent to the issues of the war ; 
and ignorance is, of course, the commonest cause of 
impartiality. It is not merely foolish but impossible 
to be a partisan in things in which one feels no interest ; 
and to millions of people this war seems as vulgar and 
undignified as a street brawl from which respectable 



IS IT PEACE ? 191 

citizens of the world will stand aloof. If its origins 
were worth investigation, it would probably be found 
to be a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, 
and they think that the real cause of the war was 
the common imperfection of all the chief belligerents. 
The Chinese are said to regard the European conflict 
as daroning proof of the defects of barbarian civilization, 
and I have read in an American quarterly journal an 
allocution by an American Roman Cathohc prelate in 
which he pointedly asks what else could be expected 
from an infidel Europe addicted to its Voltaires, Hux- 
leys, Tyndalls, Spencers, and the hke. Possibly that 
is a moral not intended for consumption on one side 
of the Atlantic alone ; but it is clear that the war pro- 
vides neutrals with a cause, or at least an occasion, 
for self-satisfaction and a sense of moral superiority, 
which by irritating the inferior but still sensitive 
belligerent obstructs the path of mediation. 

In particular, the neutral who attributes his neu- 
trality to moral elevation should be prepared with an 
answer to the question why this war differs from a 
street brawl. Respectable citizens are justified in their 
reluctance to intervene in personal quarrels because 
there are poUce forces for the disorderly, courts of 
justice for the righting of private wrongs, and legisla- 
tures for the remedy of public grievances. There are 
no such peaceful means for protecting little nations 
and penahzing the breach of international morality ; 
and when Belgium was invaded, the only alternative 
to letting her suffer wrong was intervention by way of 
war. The moral foundations of indifference to a street 
brawl do not exist for international neutrahty ; the 
conscience of the private citizen is satisfied by the 



192 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

vicarious virtue of the policeman and the law-courts. 
But if the conscience of the neutral nation is content 
to be satisfied by the vicarious efforts of others, its 
neutrahty is at least no proof of moral superiority ; 
and an intervention, which proceeds on the assumption 
that, if the parties had only been reasonable and re- 
spectable persons, they need never have fallen out at 
all, and that the war is merely a public nuisance to be 
stopped by the indifferent pressure of pacifists, is not 
calculated to bring peace to present or future genera- 
tions. We did not begin, and we do not endure, the 
war because we were not enamoured of peace, or be- 
cause war costs us little. Whatever neutrals may 
suffer, we suffer a thousandfold more in treasure and 
blood, in heart and pocket, in material loss and mental 
anguish ; and if we are willing to pay that price it is 
. not because we stand convicted of barbarism and in- 
fidelity, but because we know that moral gain is only 
bought by pain, and that to secure a lasting peace for 
ourselves and for others we have to hold cheap our 
material comfort and our transitory lives. Nor on the 
ground of distress have neutrals to-day much cause to 
complain compared with the neutrals of 1864 ; and 
hundreds of thousands of cotton operatives in Lanca- 
shire bore hardship and faced the chance of starvation 
with resignation and almost with gladness when they 
realized that their privations were part of the price 
which the world was paying to redeem it from the 
stain of slavery. 

It is no doubt hard for men to realize the vital 
importance of other men's struggles ; and the onlooker 
makes the most of his privilege of seeing two sides 
to the question at issue. Many a high-minded and 



IS IT PEACE? 193 

thoughtful Englishman held in the Civil War that 
there was much to be said for the South ; and many 
an American is to-day convinced that there is much 
to be said for Germany. We shall admit it ourselves 
in time, just as some Republicans admit to-day that 
there was force in Southern arguments. No sane 
student of politics thinks that Democrats or Repub- 
licans have a monopoly of political principle or ad- 
ministrative wisdom ; but Americans have to choose 
between a Republican or Democratic President, and 
war is a far more brutal form of antithesis. When 
once the sword has been drawn, the day of persuasion 
is passed. Lincoln could no longer argue the cause of 
Union and Abolition on the platform, and we can no 
longer plead merely with voice and pen the causes for 
which we fight. It was with him and it is with us a 
question of victory or defeat ; and nothing else matters 
in comparison. 

That again is a hard saying for neutrals at all times ; 
a bargain seems so much more normal and natural. 
Indeed, when wars are for spheres of influence or con- 
trol of trade, a bargain is the obvious and the proper 
conclusion, and it must be admitted that many people 
in Entente countries have done their best to compro- 
mise their cause by representing the war as a mere 
competition for national wealth and dominion. But 
it is not that which gives the war its critical and de- 
cisive character and puts peace by compromise out of 
the question. There is no more room for compromise 
between the clashing ideals of this war than there was 
between freedom and slavery, secession and union. 
The peace of Europe must be based in the future 
either on right or on might ; and the victor must be 

13 



194 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

either he who beUeves or he who does not beheve in 
the right of the strong to annex and control the weak. 
But a people inured to the habits and methods of peace 
finds it hard to debit others with a militarist mentality. 
The root of American pacifism is the impossibility of 
an American Government deliberately planning war 
against others. The American people cannot conceive 
of themselves in a militarist frame of mind, and they 
find it well-nigh incredible in others. That was also 
the cause of British pre-war pacifism, and our diminu- 
tive army proved our rooted disbelief in German 
aggression. We had, indeed, some of us read our 
Treitschke and our Bernhardi ; but the latter we re- 
garded as the mad mullah of militarism and the former 
as the exponent of a creed outworn in its achievements 
of a bye-gone age. The German belief in Entente 
aggression was due to a similar metempsychosis. Just 
as the pacifist thinks he is immune from attack be- 
cause he credits others with his own pacifist psychology, 
so the militarist is always convinced of the aggressive 
designs of other people. Before the war every step 
towards friendship among other nations appeared in 
German eyes as a hostile encircling of the Fatherland ; 
and to counter it Germany had to build a vast fleet, 
double her army, proclaim herself protector of three 
hundred millions of Mohammedans living in other 
States, appear in shining armour at Petrograd, and 
build strategic railways to the Belgian frontier. There 
is no peace for the militarist : in war he suffers from 
his adversaries' blows and in peace from nightmares 
due to the fare on which lie feeds his mind. 

There can therefore be no conclusive peace which 
does not exorcise the militarist mentality and rest 



IS IT PEACE f 195 

upon better foundations than force. Germany talks 
much about future security and guarantees : but the 
only security of which she thinks is her own, and the 
only guarantees are military and economic domina- 
tion. For the sake of security, she must, she says, 
control the " natural fortifications " of — France, and 
exclude all others from — Belgium ! Her only security 
consists, in fact, in the insecurity of others. The 
future peace of Europe is to be one in which Germany 
will be, through her military preponderance, immune 
from the risks of war, and will thus in peace dictate 
her will to other peoples who can easily be crushed if 
they resist ; it is to be a pax Germanica like the pace 
Roviana of the Empire of the Csesars. The security 
we want is one for the community with no German 
or other immunities, and that security can never de- 
pend on military force. How can Belgium, or Hol- 
land, or Denmark secure themselves by force of 
arms ? Their peace must rest on scraps of paper, and 
it must be as sacrosanct as that of the mightiest of 
their neighbours. When Germany seeks peace not 
for herself alone, but an equal peace for all and a 
security that shall be the common property of man, 
we shall be ready to arrange it. But the Hohenzol- 
lerns cannot seek it ; they are bound in the chains of 
their past. By war their Empire was made ; on war, 
its industry, and its psychology, they have fed their 
people : and by war they will fall. 

Incidentally, permanent peace will solve the only 
problem of freedom with which the Germans con- 
cern themselves, the freedom of the seas. For theii* 
alleged grievance in that connexion, on which Herr 
Dernburg dwelt in a famous speech two years ago, 

13* 



196 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR ^ 

only arises in time of war ; and between the wars of 
Napoleon the Great and William II, the seas re- 
mained free to all. If Germany wants to put an end 
to the advantage which Britain enjoys from her naval 
supremacy, she has only to co-operate in the efforts 
to abolish war. But war is that " political science 
par excellence " in which Germany has excelled ; and 
her notion of peace is a peace which will give her all 
the advantage in wars to come. Till she is converted 
from her philosophy of war there can be no hope of 
peace ; and she wiU not be converted until she has 
lost faith in her ancient idolatry. 

In that process there is no half-w^ay house for 
hucksters or salvation in a return to the status quo. 
For it was the conditions before the war that pro- 
duced the war, and we are determmed to avoid them 
in the future. There is no halting m that resolve, 
and our British pacifists, who would persuade neutrals 
that, but for the Defence of the Realm Acts, pubUc 
opinion would take a different colour, are easily de- 
ceived. . . . The fact is that, while territorial claims and 
cash indemnities are matters for compromise, we do not 
see how we can haggle over the moral issues of the war ; 
and we are somewhat puzzled to know how President 
Wilson would extract from a bargain for peace satis- 
faction for tliose principles of international conduct on 
which he has laid such stress. He cannot desire the 
continuance of Armenian massacres, and perhaps he 
assumes that Germany would agree to Turkey's loss 
of her misgoverned provinces. But Syria has suffered 
only less than Armenia, and nothing short of defeat 
will induce the Kaiser to abandon Turkish control of 
the land through which runs the Berlin-Baghdad route* 



is IT PEACE 9 ipt 

Peace, with the German armies unbeaten, means the 
permanent oppression of Serbia and of the subject 
peoples of the Hapsburg Empire ; it means the frustra- 
tion for ever of the hopes of the Danes in Schleswig, 
the Poles in Posen, and the majority in Alsace-Lor- 
raine. Further, it means condoning the " Lusitania " 
and " Sussex " crimes and a host of high-seas murders, 
the infraction of Belgian neutrahty, and the scrapping 
of international law. 

There can be no guarantee against the repetition 
of such deeds in the future unless there is punishment 
for their perpetrators in the past ; and there can be 
no punishment without a German defeat, for the 
criminals control the German Government and pre- 
vent the administration of justice. How can we ex- 
pect a Government, ^vith which we treat on equal 
terms, to condemn itself or punish the agents it 
directs and decorates ? Even restitution and repara- 
tion do not exhaust the demands of peace ; there 
must be renunciation as well, renunciation of the 
whole gospel of war, which may have paid Germany 
but has cost Europe its peace, milUons of men their 
lives and limbs, their hopes and homes, and has bid 
fair to cost mankind its faith. 



XIV. 

THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT.^ 

It is generally worth while to discuss an ideal, how- 
ever unattainable it may appear ; for a world without 
ideals is a world without a future, and it is by the 
selection of our ideal that we determine the direction 
of our progress. If our aim is in the right direction 
we can put up with the lengtli of the journey, and we 
do not complain of a guide-post because it points to a 
distant goal. An end that is easily reached is of little 
value as an ideal ; and the homely analogue of the 
bunch of carrots at the end of a stick derives its lesson 
from the fact that the carrots advanced as fast as the 
donkey. Even if it be true that President AVilson's 
recent speech to the Senate held out an unattainable 
object to mankind, it need not be devoid of stimulus 
and guidance ; and a Europe that is riven in twain 
by war will do wisely to ponder as best it can in the 
storm and stress of the conflict, the peace that appeals 
to the responsible ruler of far the most powerful 
neutral State. 

It is the atmosphere of quiet calm deliberation 
that is so difficult to create and maintain. Presi- 
dent Wilson is thinking and speaking in terms of 
the future : we feel so acutely the ills we bear that 

^ "The Times " Literary Supplement, 1 February, 1917 ; the re- 
ference is to the President's speech in the Senate on 22 January. 

198 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 199 

we can think only in terms of the present ; and it 
needs an effort to reach the plane of the President's 
thought and to grasp his reason. He is not compassed 
about with the hosts of Midian or cumbered with 
the needs of defence and the means of victory. He 
serenely assumes the event and is only concerned 
with its effects. We must grasp that point clearly 
first of all, or we shall entirely fail to understand the 
President's propositions. " The present war," he says, 
" must first be ended," and further he declares that 
the United States will " have no voice in determining " 
the treaties and agreements which wall bring it to an 
end. He has, and he wiH have, nothing to do with 
the war ; neutral the States have been from the first, 
and neutral they will remain to the last ; and quite 
logically and fairly the President disclaims any am- 
bition to act as umpire between the belligerent Powers. 
He will not play the part of President Roosevelt at 
the Portsmouth negotiations between Russia and 
Japan. For that we are grateful, beheving as we do 
in our victory ; ^ we shall only regret it if we are beaten. 
But that is our affair ; the President's pohcy is more 
original and more ambitious than that of Mr. Roose- 
velt. 

While he wWl have nothmg to do with brmging 
peace to pass, Mr. Wilson hopes to assist in makmg 
it permanent. He is a political architect of the future, 
and it is with the permanence of peace after the war 
that he is concerned. There must, he says, be "a 
definite concert of the Powers which will make it 

1 The Russian Revolution of course destroyed for the time the 
basis of the confidence that became general after the fall of Bapaume 
and Baghdad. 



200 THE COMMOmVEALTH AT fVAtl 

virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should 
ever overwhelm us again". But a mere European 
concert mil be unequal to maintaming the peace of 
the world ; it would not, we may interject, preclude a 
war between the United States and Japan. Hence 
the interest of America in the future peace of man- 
kind. The United States must join the League of 
Nations. But it can only come in on terms consistent 
with its liberal principles. James Mom'oe could not 
join the Holy Alliance projected by Alexander I and 
perverted by jNIetternich ; indeed, he set up against 
it that famous doctrine of his own, which Canning 
and his successors and the British Navy turned into 
practical politics and President Wilson now seeks 
to apply to Europe. We need not grudge this 
victory of the doctrinal offspring we fathered over 
the legitimism we abandoned. Nor need we feel 
hurt if the President leaves it to the belligerents to 
garner the harvest which he will only help to guard 
if he considers it worth protecting. Neutrality is im- 
posed upon him by the public opinion to which he is 
responsible, and our business is to see what can be 
made out of his contingent co-operation in the future. 
He cannot assist in the harvesting ; he Avill not 
hinder, but he will not help us further than by saying 
that, unless we reap a satisfactory crop, it mil not be 
worth America's while to partake in preserving the 
fruits of our labour. 

Our difficulty lies in appearances, and the Presi- 
dent seems to pose as our taskmaster. We are to win 
the war and he is to keep the peace that is won. But 
if the task is not of his doing, it is also not of his setting ; 
it is one we have set ourselves and shall be proud of 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 20 1 

achieving without assistance. It is well that Europe 
should redeem herself; but we need not doubt the 
President's sympathy merely because he has expressed 
our ideals in the catchwords of our enemies. Catch- 
words, unfortunately, have a much larger and more 
rapid circulation than reasoned arguments ; and the 
President's references to a "peace without victory" 
and " freedom of the seas "■ — designed, no doubt, to 
sugar the pill for German and some American readers 
— have rendered the substance of his policy unpalatable 
to superficial tastes in Entente countries. But if we 
probe a Httle deeper than the surface we shall find 
that the President's peace is almost as far as our own 
from a German peace, and that his conditions imply 
the triumph of our principles. He contends that the 
statesmen of both belUgerent groups " have said in 
terms that could not be misinterpreted, that it was no 
part of the purpose they had in mind to crush their 
antagonists ". But there are pitfalls in oratio obliqua, 
and what statesmen on both sides aver is that the 
crushing of peoples is no part of the purpose they 
have in mind. Germans themselves have disavowed 
objects they avowed two years ago ; and " peace with- 
out victory" means a peace without the victory of 
those who set out to crush Serbia and France. 

This becomes clear as we pursue the President's 
definition of the peace he has in mind. It is to rest 
on certain fundamental principles. The first is the 
absolute equaUty of nations, great and small — not, of 
course, an equality of territory or resources, but an 
equal right to peace, security, and independence in 
the development of their own moral and material 
activities. The second, " a deeper thing involved 



202 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

than even equality of right among organized nations," 

is the recognition of '* the principle that Governments 

derive all their just powers from the consent of the 

governed ". These indeed are the principles for which 

we fight and President Wilson argues ; but before we 

attempt to elucidate and apply them we stumble 

across another catchword, the " freedom of the seas ". 

The trouble again is ambiguity. The President opens 

his paragraph vdth what looks like a plea for Russian 

freedom of access to the sea thi'ough the Bosphorus and 

Dardanelles ; and the Germans, not owning both 

shores of these narrows Hke the Turks, admit that 

there is something in the argument, desiring only its 

extension to the Suez, but not to the Kiel, Canal, and 

discreetly refraining from reference to Panama. But 

Mr. Wilson goes on to claim that " the paths of the 

sea must alike in law and in fact be free ... in 

practically all circumstances for the use of mankind ". 

Now, this is a crucial ambiguity. Does the President 

mean freedom in times of peace or freedom in times 

of war ? If in times of peace, there is nothing to 

discuss : the seas, thanks mainly to the British Navy, 

are always free in times of peace alike in law and in 

fact, and the Germans do not dispute it. But what 

they, and some of the President's supporters, mean is 

freedom in times of war ; and by the freedom of the 

seas they mean the restriction of a belligerent's naval 

power. 

This, the President admits, *' opens the wider and 
perhaps more difficult question of the limitation of 
armies and of all progi'ammes of military prepara- 
tion ". Even that does not meet the point. This is 
not a question of limiting armaments, naval or military, 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 20S 

but of restricting belligerent rights ; and it is neither 
an equitable nor a practicable policy to impose on 
ships at sea restraints from which armies on land are 
free. If there is to be war at all, we cannot prevent 
a belligerent from blockading a port unless we can 
also prevent him from besieging a city. Such an in- 
terpretation of the " freedom of the seas " is, however, 
in fundamental contradiction to the whole spirit of 
the President's speech. He is only concerned with 
war in order to make it impossible ; and if he can 
make peace permanent he establishes automatically 
the permanent freedom of the seas. But war will 
not be prevented by limiting its risks, and the peace 
of Europe will not be made secure by guaranteeing 
Germany against the penalties of breaking it. It is 
not by naval power that the peace of Europe or of 
America has been broken these last hundred years ; 
and if hope of permanent peace is now dawning in 
the West, it comes from the New World which a 
naval Power called into existence to redress the 
balance of the Old. 

From this aberration in the interests of war and 
war-profiteering neutrality we return to the President's 
bases of permanent peace. His doctrine of equality 
among nations is the proper and effective antidote to 
that philosophy of the superman upon which Nietzsche, 
Treitschke, Bernhardi, and their disciples have fed the 
mind and built the State of Germany. The equality 
cannot be a physical equahty any more than we can 
secure equality of physical strength, intellectual ca- 
pacity or material resources among individual men 
and women. Their security, the absence of fear 
with which the poor and weak pursue their common 



204 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

rounds and trivial tasks, depends upon a legal equality 
guaranteed by the supremacy of the State and the 
conscience of the community. So the peace of the 
little nations must be secured by international power 
and the conscience of mankind ; the sanction which 
guards the freedom and equality of individual men 
must be expanded into one to guard the freedom and 
equality of individual nations, and the Serbias and the 
Belgiums of the future must be secured against the 
threats of over-mighty neighbours. 

The principle is plain enough, but the expansion 
of its application from individuals to nations is beset 
with practical difficulties. We know what an indi- 
vidual is, but what is a nation ? The President selects 
as typical the simplest case at issue, and pronounces 
emphatically in favour of " a united, independent, and 
autonomous Poland ". Presumably " united " implies 
the union of Poles in Germany and Austria with 
those in Russia ; but the Kaiser might ask, why is a 
Pole in Posen any more part of a united Polish nation 
than a Pole in New York State ? The truth is that, 
in spite of hyphenated Americans, the President can 
regard the problem of nationality from a more de- 
tached point of view than European statesmen. The 
millions of hyphenated Americans have detached 
themselves from Irish, German, or Polish soil and from 
much of the subtle influence of its history ; they are 
half American, and they have suffered or gained as 
much by their dispersion as the Jews. It is one of 
the services which Tammany renders to the United 
States that it gi*ips the Irish immigrant and converts 
him into a pawn of the Democratic Party instead of 
leav^ing him to form an Irish party of his own. But 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 205 

supposing the millions of Germans or Poles or Irish 
in the United States had concentrated on the Pacific 
coast, in the Middle West, or in the South, and had 
formed predominantly German, Polish, or Irish States, 
the President might have been more shy of the doctrine 
of nationality. Abraham Lincoln at least denied that 
the South was a separate nation, or that there could 
be any nation but one within the United States. Is 
it Lincoln's doctrine or his own that Mr. Wilson will 
apply to the Hapsburg Empire before he will recognize 
in the settlement that equality of nations without 
which he will withhold the sanction of the United 
States ? And if Poles are to be united, why not Jugo- 
slavs, Schleswig-Danes, Rumanians, and Italians ? 

President Wilson seems, however, to imply a 
distinction between " organized nations " and mere 
" peoples ". Equality of national rights is to be the 
privilege of the nations, and government by consent 
that of the peoples. But the distinction is rather 
between international relations and domestic politics. 
We take it that the President would apply the 
principle of government by consent to organized 
nations as well as to subordinate nationalities, in 
which case his approval of the settlement appears 
to be contingent on a revolution in Germany and 
perhaps another in Russia ; for we can hardly imagine 
a HohenzoUern accepting " the principle that Govern- 
ments derive all their just powers from the consent 
of the governed ". But if the Poles, who are not an 
organized nation, are to be formed into "a united, 
independent, and autonomous Poland," that Poland 
will become entitled to an equality of national rights, 
and the difficulty remains of distinguishing between 



206 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

the peoples thus to be organized and those to be 
treated otherwise. Mr. Wilson lights upon one de- 
tail in the problem when he speaks of the cession of 
territory to provide *' great peoples " with access to 
the sea. Territory is generally occupied by peoples, 
yet " no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about 
from potentate to potentate as if they were property ". 
The word " potentate " again sugars the pill for 
American taste, but what if the potentate is a " great 
people " and the little peoples dwell in Hawaii or the 
Philippines ? This is not intended as a gibe, but as a 
reminder of complexities in the problem of nationality 
which we have ever with us. Is Ireland a nation, and 
does it include Ulster ? We know that the chief 
obstacle to Home Rule is the fear lest its grant to 
Ireland as a whole should prejudice freedom in Ulster. 
That is precisely one of the problems in the Hapsburg 
Empire. Half a century ago Ave hailed as a liberal 
triumph the autonomy of Hungary. Yet that au- 
tonomy set the Magyars free to inflict upon Jugo- 
slavs and Rumanians within their borders greater 
hardships than those they bore in a united Empire. 
If the Magyars are a nation within the Hapsburg 
Empire, are not also the Rumanians in Transylvania 
a nation inside Hungary ? 

The mere recognition of the principles of nation- 
ality and government by consent will not solve the 
problems of the settlement ; and the bare mention of 
Czechs and Slovaks, Armenians and Syrians, Italians 
in the Trentino and Trieste, French in Alsace-Lor- 
raine, suffices to indicate the difficulty of securing tlie 
President's conditions by means of that " peace with- 
out victory " which he enjoins. Nor do we quite 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 207 

understand how Mr. Wilson would enforce his 
principles upon those who reject them without that 
humihation, duress, and sacrifice which he deplores. 
The only means of reconciling the achievement of 
his aims with an avoidance of these evils would be a 
voluntary renunciation on the part of the Central 
Empires and their AUies, and that voluntary renuncia- 
tion would involve a revolution of their peoples against 
their Governments and the principles on which they 
govern. How that is to be effected by the AUies 
without a victory Mr. Wilson does not explain. 

He is not indeed concerned with the war ; hke 
Euclid, he assumes the hypotheses upon which he 
proposes to work and without which his edifice falls 
to the ground. There is only a verbal contradiction 
between his " peace without victory " and Mr. Head- 
lam's dictum that it is only victory which matters. 
To belUgerents strivmg to lay those foundations it 
may seem that, when once we have secured this re- 
nunciation of the things for which the Central Empires 
have fought, the task for which the President has 
reserved the energies of the United States will be 
comparatively easy. Even so, it is doubtful whether 
his people will partake in these futurist labours, and 
we may have to rest content with the President as a 
preceptor of international conduct. That, as he says, 
must be based upon rights ; but he has travelled far 
enough on the path of MachiaveUi and Austin to 
reach the conclusion that right abstracted from might 
is an inadequate safeguard of peace. " It will be 
absolutely necessary that a force be created as a 
guarantor of the permanency of the settlement." 
There must not, however, be " a balance of power. 



208 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

but a community of power ". This is sound doctrine. 
Nothing is more unstable than a balance, and the 
temptation to upset it and efforts to preserve it in- 
volved Europe in the race for armaments. Personal 
security, moreover, is not maintained by a balance of 
power, but by that " community of power " which we 
call the State, with its agents, the police and the law 
courts. But this community of power depends upon 
a community of will and mind ; and law and order 
were in an evil case so long as there was anything like 
a balance of strength between the orderly and the 
disorderly, between the will-to-power and the will- 
to-peace. The national State was the outcome of a 
slowly dawning conviction in the mind of the com- 
munity that it loses by disorder. The United States 
of Europe may develop from a universal European 
war begetting a universal will-to-peace. 

There is not much doubt about the will-to-peace. 
Even the Germans are losing their appetite for war, 
ceasing to read the war-philosophy on which they fed, 
and developing a taste for President Wilson's post- 
prandial eirenics. Similar symptoms manifested 
themselves towards the end of Louis XIV's and 
Napoleon's wars, and congresses busied themselves 
with projects of permanent peace in the early eigh- 
teenth and nineteenth centuries. But the loss of 
appetite which follows a hearty meal, while recurrent, 
does not last. It will be easier to make peace than 
to make it permanent ; and President Wilson might 
have no sinecure as its trustee had he not protected 
himself by stipulating that peace shall be so made by 
others as to be permanent in its own virtue. The 
analogy between the State, which saves its nationals 



THE PEACE OF THE PRESIDENT 209 

from disorder, and a federation of the world, which is 
to save nations from war, is imperfect because the 
permanence of disorder sustains a permanent appetite 
for law, while the intermittence of war stimulates only 
a spasmodic passion for peace. Disorder, moreover, 
pervades the whole State when anarchy supervenes, 
but war is no more universal than it is perennial. 
Most countries in Europe had had enough of war by 
1815, but there was fighting in the Balkans and in 
Spain within a few years of the Peace of Vienna ; and 
the war- weariness of Europe will not guarantee peace 
in the Pacific, though doubtless it would be an excel- 
lent thing if it could be used for that purpose. Man, 
however, is growing up ; each generation of adults 
will not need, like each generation of children, to be 
chastised afresh for the same ignorances and offences. 
If the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the 
children, so will the children inherit the lessons their 
parents have taken to heart. If this and succeeding 
generations have the wisdom to learn of history, they 
will strengthen and lengthen the communal memory 
of man ; and the race wiU look before and after, and 
rejoice in the war that is not. 

But peace is no panacea. It may become intoler- 
able. Germans speak the truth when they say they 
did not want war. They wanted peace, but they 
were bent on a peace that was intolerable to the 
greater part of Europe. It was their conception of 
peace that made this war inevitable ; and President 
Wilson is right in holding that the future avoidance 
of war depends upon the nature of peace. His " com- 
munity of power " is but a means to an end, and the 
success of a method depends on the purpose to which 

14 



210 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

it is put. The so-called Holy Alliance did not break 
down because it was a concert of Europe, but because 
it was used for repression. The President thinks 
that a new concert of Powers may succeed if it 
represents a community of peoples making for free- 
dom of life. But freedom means scope for develop- 
ment ; for a static world is impossible, and a stereo- 
typed settlement would only be fruitful in friction. 
All we can hope from permanent peace is the elimina- 
tion of war as a means of settling human differences. 
That is not an idle dream. War has been ehminated 
as a method of concluding religious disputes, and great 
progress was made in the nineteenth century by 
diplomacy as the means of compromising rival ambi- 
tions in the colonial sphere. Are the economic 
disputes of mankind less tractable than their religious 
faiths or their love of political power ? It may be so, 
and that economic wars will succeed wars of national- 
ity just as wars of nationality succeeded those of 
religion. But wars of religion were not national, and 
it is possible that those who assume that the economic 
wars of the future will be national are making a mis- 
calculation. If those wars are not national, President 
Wilson's concert of nations may fall between the 
stools of a Holy Alliance of capital and a revolution- 
ary league of labour. His end is peace, but there is 
no peace without a community of power based on a 
community of mind and spirit which transcends the 
estranging influences of creed, nationality, and class. 
These are all built on the differentia of mankind ; he 
who would establish a perfect peace must found it on 
the common needs and aspirations of humanity. 



XV. 

TWILIGHT m THE EAST.^ 

Two months ago we were most of us acclaiming the 
dawn of a new era in Russia with almost as much 
enthusiasm as Charles James Fox showed over the 
fall of the BastiUe. " How much the greatest event 
is this that has ever happened," he cried, " and how 
much the best ! " Seventeen years later Fox died at 
the head of a Coalition Ministry formed to combat 
the forces born of the revolution he had welcomed ; 
and doubts have already dimmed our faith in Russian 
redemption. Is it, indeed, a dawn that we see in the 
twilight, or the gathering gloom of a wasted war? 
The answer partly depends on our test of light. For 
most of us there is only one test to-day for all our 
human affairs, and that is the test of war. Whatso- 
ever tends to our victory is good, and everything else 
is bad. That concentration is inevitable, and without 
it we could not win the war against an enemy who 
has carried it further than we have. But it involves 
an enormous distortion of human values, and demands 
a uniformity of dogma which is both strained and 
transient. The Russian revolution has a value quite 
independent of the war, and probably more permanent 
than any other outcome of the conflict. To us the 

i"The Times" Literary Supplement, 24 May, 1917. 

211 14 * 



212 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

revolution is merely an incident in the war ; to the 
Russian people the war is only of interest as it affects 
the revolution. Fundamental agreement is possible 
only in the conviction that on the defeat of Germany 
depends the success of the revolution, and on the suc- 
cess of the rev^olution depends the defeat of Germany. 
Neither here nor in Russia is that conviction universal ; 
nor is either proposition absolutely true. Success is 
a relative term, and no German success that is now 
in sight would restore the Romanovs in Russia, though 
a Romanov restoration might re-estabhsh the declin- 
ing fortunes of the HohenzoUerns. 

Russia, however, remains in the twihght for 
Western eyes from lack of vision as well as from lack 
of light. The Petrograd correspondent of a leading 
French journal, who had hved in Russia for ten years, 
remarked the other day that no Westerner could ever 
understand Russia. We may do our best with the 
help of Russian interpreters, some of them highly 
skilled in observation and literary expression, and 
well versed in Eastern and Western tongues. But 
it is not given to every Englishman or Frenchman to 
understand his own country, and the understanding 
of Russia by Russians themselves is beset with far 
gi'eater difficulties. The gulfs between race and race, 
class and class, in all the Russias outmatch tliose in 
England and France as much as the spaces within 
their respective fi'ontiers ; and for centuries Russian 
autocracy, by its neglect of education and restraint 
upon all forms of popular self-expression, set itself to 
prevent the Russians from understanding themselves. 
It was an instinctive and a natural policy ; for when a 
people really understands itself tliere is no longer need 



TWILIGHT IN THE EAST 213 

nor room for autocracy. The fate of the Russian 
revolution depends upon whether the Russian people 
has found itself as the French did in 1789. Sudden 
conversions are not impossible, and they come easier 
to emotional peoples. The signs seem to point in 
that direction, and it will be wise to discount the im- 
pression which the past history of Russia has made 
upon the West. 

For that impression has been made by the Russian 
Government ; and the apparently complete collapse 
of the old Russian Government is due to the fact that, 
more than in any other European country, Russian 
government was an article of foreign manufacture. 
The old gibe about scratching a Russian and finding 
a Tartar indicates the alien influence which created 
Russian autocracy. Peter the Great, it has been 
said, clothed the barbarian ruler in evening dress, gave 
a Western fa9ade to an Oriental structure, and 
opened a window on to the Baltic by building Petro- 
grad. In the century which followed, Russian govern- 
ment was German or French — mainly German — and 
all the authors of Poland's partition were Germans by 
birth. When Lord Acton twenty years ago referred 
to " that tremendous power, supported by millions of 
bayonets," which grew up at Petrograd and Berlin, 
as " the greatest danger that remains to be encountered 
by the Anglo-Saxon race," he was describing a power 
which had two habitats, but a single home ; and its 
expulsion from Petrogi'ad Hnks the Russian revolution 
with the European war. In the nineteenth century 
it assumed a more native hue, but its heart was far 
from the Russian people. Bismarck, while Ambas- 
sador at Petrograd, developed the common interest 



214 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

which Prussian and Russian autocracy had in Polish 
oppression, and the poison which made Russia despotic 
made Germany Prussian. 

Under that C^esarism Russia expanded with a 
rapidity that retarded its constitutional development, 
and Imperialism became the antidote to domestic re- 
form. It was through the failures of autocracy that 
the people made what progress it did ; the Crimean 
rebuff precipitated the emancipation of the serfs and 
the creation of Zemstvos, and the Korean misadven- 
ture provoked the by no means abortive revolution of 
1905. We must not expect the Russian to look at 
Imperial expansion with our eyes, for with us empire 
has gone hand in hand with liberty, with them it 
has worn the vizor of repression ; and M. MiliukofTs 
desire for Constantinople has condemned him as a 
reactionary. There may come a Russia which will 
regret opportunities lost in this revulsion against all 
that savours of Tsardom, .and Constantinople was 
compromised by being called Tsargrad ; but the infant 
Hercules of Russian democracy is young and only 
remembers the foes who delayed its birth and 
threatened to strangle it in its cradle. For forty 
years, said Prof Vinogradoff in 1902, " we have been 
living in Russia in a kind of civil war ". To our dis- 
tant Western eyes Alexander II's emancipation of 
the serfs seemed to settle that problem ; but a Rus- 
sian magistrate has remarked : " There is no indignity 
which in the beginning of the twentieth century may 
not be inflicted on a Russian peasant ". The war is 
a thing apart to the peasant, whose whole existence 
is affected by the revolution. 

Some alleviation was, of course, procured by the 



TWILIGHT IN THE EAST 215 

first and second Dumas, but they were too advanced 
for the bureaucracy, and by an Imperial ukase in 1907 
over a hundred constituencies were disfranchised, 
millions of Russians lost their votes, and the electoral 
system was made more fanciful than that of the 
Prussian Diet. That the fourth Duma, begotten by 
such means, should nevertheless have been driven 
into almost unanimous opposition to the Court and 
the bureaucracy bears eloquent testimony to the char- 
acter of Russian government ; but it is equally clear 
that such a Duma could not reflect the opinion of an 
emancipated people, and the Soldiers' and Workmen's 
Delegates were called into existence by more legiti- 
mate causes than irresponsible anarchy. The Provi- 
sional Government was a Duma Committee ; but the 
Duma neither made the revolution nor represented 
those who made it. Its services consisted in provid- 
ing the means for transferrmg authority from the 
Tsardom to popular representatives without any 
absolute hiatus ; its function was transitional, and it 
may be that the coalition, by which six of the dele- 
gates are admitted to Prince LvofF's Cabinet, is tran- 
sitional also. The process may seem a rapid advance 
to extremes ; but extreme is itself a relative term. 
A sound conservative Enghshman might well be an 
extremist in Prussia ; the extremist ceases to be ex- 
treme when his fellow-countrymen agree ; and in any 
case a social democracy can only be governed by 
social democrats. The dualism, under which office 
was held by a Duma Committee and power was 
wielded by Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates, could 
only produce anarchy as its offspring. 

It is not, however, clear that the Soldiers' and 



216 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Workmen's Delegates represent the Russian people. 
Eighty-five per cent of the population is rural, and 
though some of the soldiers' delegates come from the 
peasant class, the Peasants' Congress now sitting in 
Petrograd may moderate the views of the Russian 
Government. But numbers count for less in politics 
than in war ; for in politics men can think and act for 
themselves, while in war they cannot ; and a minority 
which thinks outweighs a majority which is incapable 
of thought or common action. If the individual Rus- 
sian peasant could be equated with tlie individual 
craftsman, the 85 per cent would make a peasant 
state of Russia. 

Here we reach the heart of obscurity. What is 
in the Russian peasant's mind ? He is a strange 
peasant if his heart is not in the land, and his attitude 
towards the war will be largely determined by his in- 
terest in the land. His emancipation fi*om serfdom 
was merely a change from legal to economic duress ; 
the land allotted to him was the refuse of the land- 
lords, and it was burdened with fiscal obligations based 
on the value of the peasant's labour on the richer soil 
of his lords. The result was grinding poverty decked 
out as legal freedom. It is on those richer lands that 
the peasant's eyes are fixed, and it is not easy to 
divert them to more distant and less tangible objects. 
Even the German invasion has affected him little, for 
it is the Poles and the Lithuanians who have suffered, 
and not the Russian peasant. Nor has he the motive 
which made enthusiastic soldiers out of French peas- 
ants during the first French Revolution ; for their 
landlords fled to Coblentz and sought to return in the 
train of Brunswick's army. If Russian landlords had 



TWILIGHT IN THE EAST 217 

escaped to Hindenburg's headquarters and had been 
welcomed by the Kaiser, there would be less ambiguity 
in the Russian peasant's attitude towards the war. 
As it is, the Russian landlord stayed at home and 
distracts the peasant's attention. 

We have to remember this fact if we are to under- 
stand the Russian attitude towards aimexations and 
indemnities. We are busy explaining away the con- 
tradiction between the Russian revolutionary and our 
Western definition of the objects of the war ; and, 
indeed, there is common ground in the interpretation 
that " no annexation " refers to the past as well as to 
the future and imphes the restoration of nationalities 
which have not been reconciled to annexation. But 
" no indemnities " is a hard saying in the ears of Bel- 
gian and Serbian and even French peasants who have 
seen their land wantonly ruined beyond the wicked 
needs of war. They cannot recoup themselves out of 
the richer estates of neighbouring landlords saved by 
distance from the waste of fire and sword. It is the 
defect of the genuine revolutionist to deduce the 
broadest general propositions from his own personal 
needs and experience ; and the narrower his practical 
experience, the more dogmatic will be his generahza- 
tion. The Russian peasant is not indifferent to in- 
demnities, but he sees them nearer home than on the 
field of battle ; and with his eyes fixed on the domestic 
means of relieving his economic distress, foreign wars 
may well appear unwelcome interruptions, diplomacy 
an irrelevance, and national ambition a superfluity. 
Nor is the industrialist, in Russia and elsewhere, im- 
mune from the influence of similar ideas. There are 
some who are pacifists not for the sake of peace but 



218 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

for the sake of their own special brand of war ; inter- 
national peace appeals to them as an overture to social 
war, and they oppose the present war because it divides 
the forces of social revolution and postpones the war of 
classes. Wars did not cease when they ceased to be 
fought for religion ; and the ehmination of nationality, 
for which the logical Catholic longs, would not make 
peace between labour and capital. 

Perhaps it is as well that the old legal maxim 
Nemo potest exuere patriam applies in a general sense, 
and that patriotism is a bond of unity as well as 
a source of discord. Patriotism, or a rarer zest for 
mercy, has certainly tempered the Russian Revolu- 
tion ; and stress should be laid on the remarkable 
rapidity and success with which Russia appears to 
have overcome the tendencies inherent in every re- 
volution. Faith indeed was required to believe that 
any basis of national unity could be speedily fomid as 
an alternative to that provided by the Tsardom and 
the Orthodox Church ; and it is clear that the West 
has under-estimated the spread of political education 
among the Russian people, and the growth of a 
common sense in all the diverse parts of Russia's vast 
dominions. But when we read of social democracy 
in regions which we thought Oriental in civilization, 
and see Deputies from east and west, north and south, 
representing various parties but joining to form a 
coalition, we have obviously to discount the sharp 
contrasts commonly drawn between new Petrograd 
and old Moscow, Great Russians and Little Russians, 
peasants and craftsmen, and to admit that a fusion 
which took the West centuries to achieve is apparently 
being accomplished in Russia in as many months. 



TWILIGHT IN THE EAST 219 

Nor should we blind ourselves to the possibility of 
error in our now fashionable habit of seeing an 
economic cause in all political movements and dis- 
covering everywhere an economic bar to national 
unity. It is a German jest that der Mensch ist was 
er isst ; but a Russian national State may be made 
out of sounder stuff than German economic theories. 
A nation that went to war for a scrap of paper should 
be able to discern an uneconomic spirit in other 
nationalities. 

It would be idle to pretend that Russia's military 
organization has not been shaken in the convulsion, 
or that the war may not be prolonged in consequence. 
But it is a far cry to the German assumption that 
Russia has ceased to be a serious factor in the situa- 
tion. The Younger Pitt made a similar miscalcula- 
tion about the French Revolution, and as late as 1792 
was budgeting for years of peace based on the founder- 
ing of French military power. The Kaiser has re- 
frained from his ancestor's blunder in championing 
autocracy against revolution, but his armies are on 
Russian soil, and his Junkers will see to it that they 
do not withdraw empty-handed. His Chancellor 
may talk of the peace which Russia may have at a 
price, but he knows that Russia will not and cannot 
pay the price ; and the peace for which he hopes is 
merely a truce on the Eastern Front procured by Rus- 
sian dissension. Even that he will not get, and the 
Russian Army is by no means in the parlous plight 
of the French in 1791-2. There has been a similar 
shock to discipline, but Russian officers are not the 
aristocratic caste that the French were under the 
ancien regime, and they have not emigrated in a body. 



220 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

lea\dng the Army to find its leaders iii the ranks. 
Nor is it reduced, hke the French, to scraping the 
walls of houses for saltpetre to make munitions. 

The military aspect of the problem is the one 
which impresses us most, because in this all-absorbing 
war we can hardly think in any other than military 
terms. But we may be sure that other aspects of the 
Russian Revolution are not without weight in Ger- 
many. Even in Germany public opinion is an element 
in success, and public opinion has been profoundly 
moved by the Russian Revolution. AVe sometimes 
forget the efforts the Kaiser 4nade in July, 1914, to 
represent the war as war on the Russian bugbear. 
As a war on Tsardom it appealed to the German 
Socialist, and he was right enough in regardmg the 
Tsardom as a principal bulwark of the HohenzoUerns. 
But the war has been perverted from a war against 
Tsardom into a war against a Socialistic RepubHc, 
and it is at least as hkely that German Socialists may 
object to fighting a Russian RepubHc as that Russian 
SociaHsts will object to fighting the Kaiser. The 
spring has seen a simplification of the war and its 
issues by converting American democracy to belliger- 
ency and the Russian belligerent to democracy ; and 
the Ides of March may prove in the end to have been 
as fatal to the German as to the Russian heu' of Caesar's 
name and mantle. 



XVI. 

THE PARADOX OF THE BRITISH 
EMPIRE.^ 

It was a jest of Voltaire's that the Holy Roman Em- 
pu*e was so called because it was neither holy nor 
Roman, nor an empire. The British Empire is not 
quite so paradoxical, because it is at least partially 
British ; but it is only an Empire in a sense which 
makes nonsense of the word, for it is like no other 
Empii'e that ever existed, and it would certainly smell 
as sweet if called by any other name. General Smuts 
recently remarked that the man who found a proper 
name for it would be doing real service to the Empii*e. 
Perhaps now that there is to be an EngUsh Tripos at 
Cambridge, the combined intelligence of our university 
schools of English may succeed in finding English 
names for that and other EngUsh things. At present 
the hand of classical language lies heavy on political 
science, and we have never escaped from the juvenile 
habit of trying to turn Enghsh thought into Greek 
and Latin prose and to describe English institutions 
in incongruous classical terms. Some of our peda- 
gogues even cudgel their own and their pupils' brains 
to think what words an ancient Greek would have 
used to describe a " Q " boat or a " tank," and it may 

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement 7 June, 1917. 
221 



222 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

be long before they realize that ideas which no Greek 
could understand cannot be turned into real Greek 
prose. While that obsession lasts we shall have to 
look to America for the gi'owth of the English lan- 
guage, and continue to give our latest inventions 
irrelevant classical names ; a chemist finds it easier to 
discover a new gas than to invent an English name 
for his discovery, and it will require a greater effort 
to substitute Commonwealth for Empire than to 
organize its government. 

General Smuts has not merely exposed that par- 
ticular terminological inexactitude in a speech ; he is 
a living refutation of the falsehood of the word and a 
monument to the virtue of the thing. The Empire 
which has won the minds of Louis Botha and Jan 
Smuts has acquired something of which it stood in 
greater need than of gold or territory, and it has won 
those minds by a quality in the British Empire which 
belies its name. It is the spirit of adoption which 
leads General Smuts to acclaim Great Britain as the 
senior partner in a common concern. The German 
can annex, but he cannot attract ; for Kultiir is an 
acid rather than a base, a solvent rather than a foun- 
dation of empire. Hence the German reliance on 
force ; nothing less than a militarist mould of iron 
could counteract the disruptive effect of Kitltur. No 
such constraint was needed for the British Common- 
wealth, and no such congeries of peoples has ever been 
held together by so slight a material bond. It is not, 
in fact, the British Army or the British Navy which 
holds. the Empire together. They are needed to pro- 
tect it from external foes, but not from internal dis- 
ruption ; and the Empire is a reign of the spirit and 



THE PARADOX OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 223 

not a reign of the sword. It is the spirit that matters, 
and, as General Smuts remarked, too much stress may- 
be laid on the instruments of government : " Where 
they built up a common patriotism and a common 
ideal, the instrument of government would not be a 
thing that mattered so much as the spirit which actu- 
ated the whole spirit of government ". We have 
never, indeed, been adepts at expressing in our laws 
the secrets of our successful administration, and a sur- 
vey of the Statute-book would give Httle idea of the 
British Constitution or of how it has groAvn. The 
fundamentals of our system are not its statutes, but 
its customs and its conventions, and the student of 
constitutional history will find more of the spiiit 
of British government in the records of our Law 
Courts than in our Acts of Parliament. We may 
never make a united Empire by an act of legislation, 
but we have gone far towards making one by our 
administration of justice, and the proceedings of the 
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council would, if the 
public ever read the reports, do more to enlighten it 
about the British Empire than all the debates in 
Parliament. 

Indeed, if those who most desire a united Empire 
informed theu' minds with a study of the means by 
which a united England came into existence, they 
would lay less stress upon Parliamentary legislation 
and more upon judicial administration and mterpreta- 
tion. For assuredly England was not made one by 
Act of Parliament, so much as by the hammering out 
in the Courts of a common EngUsh law : and the 
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is in much 
the same way evoMng a common basis of Imperial 



224 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

law. That basis is, perhaps, moral rather than legal 
in the strict sense of the word ; some might even call 
it spiritual, but whatever we choose to call the work, 
its authors are laying the very foundations of that 
confidence, contentment, and consent which hold 
together the British realms without the constraint of 
military force. If it would be a public service to find 
a native name for the British Empire, it would help 
us still more if some one found the means to popular- 
ize a knowledge of the principal factor in its archi- 
tecture. As it is, the Judicial Committee of the Privy 
Council labours under a cumbrous title, amid undig- 
nified and almost shabby surroundings ; and the only 
section of the public which is not indifferent to its 
proceedings consists of High Churchmen, who regard 
it as anathema because it embodies the principle of 
temporal jurisdiction in ecclesiastical affairs. 

We have to travel far afield to find appreciation 
of its work ; it is on the confines of the Empire that 
men value most the links that bind them to its centre, 
and it is humble folk most liable to oppression who 
set the greatest store on the justice administered by 
the Privy Council. One of the tales that illumine 
the quality of the British Empire tells how a hill tribe 
in India was discovered offering sacrifice to a deity it 
called the Privy Council in gratitude for a wrong it 
had redressed. A less known and more recent inci- 
dent illustrates the spirit in which it interprets the 
white man's burden. The custodian of an Indian 
temple, before his death, stated that the god he wor- 
shipped had appeared to him and directed him to 
nominate a particular successor. The succession led 
to litigation, in which the local Court upheld the story 



THE PARADOX OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 225 

of the god's appearance and the vahdity of the 
nomination. On appeal, the higher Court in India, 
superior to local faiths, reversed the decision, and it 
was ultimately brought before the Judicial Committee 
of the Privy Council. We can well imagine how ab- 
stract dogma and uncompromising adherence to our 
own Kultur would deal with it. True religion would 
scout the superstitious story, and demand the applica- 
tion of Western enhghtenment to the local custom 
and tribal ideas of an Indian village ; and the humbled 
petitioners would be sent back to nurse a sense of 
grievance at the lack of sympathy and understand- 
ing displayed by a superior civilization. The Judicial 
Committee thought otherwise, and, straining perhaps 
the orthodoxy of some of its members, it sided with 
the local Court, presumably on the theory that facts 
are what they appear to be to those whom they most 
concern, and on the principle that, while the inter- 
pretation which German Kultur places on the maxim 
" put yourself in his place " is " oust him," the inter- 
pretation of the British Empire is " understand him ". 
It is by thus divesting itself of its own particular 
brand of Kultur that the Privy Council successfully 
interprets the multifarious varieties of law — Hindu, 
Mahomedan, Canadian-French, Roman-Dutch, and 
English common law transmuted by the statutes of 
scores of local legislatures — with which it has to deal ; 
and its practice is an education in the elements of 
empire. Its practice is liberal because its hands are 
free. It is not a court of common law bound by a 
mass of rules and precedents. It interprets customs, 
but it is not bound by them ; no code fetters its dis- 
cretion, and Parliament discreetly leaves it alone. It 

15 



226 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

is, in fact, in almost precisely the position of the curia 
regis under Henry II and his successors, which, bor- 
rowing from various sources of jurisprudence, welded 
those elements together, and, applying them injudicial 
eyres to the local customs of Enghsh shires, created 
a common law, and prepared the way for common 
pohtics and a common English Parliament. If there 
is ever to be a common Parliament of the Empire, its 
path will have to be made straight by a common Im- 
perial law evolved in the Privy Council and grafted 
on to the national Courts of the Empire by judicial 
visitations. We have brought judges to Westminster 
from all the Dominions ; the process needs supple- 
menting by the periodical appearance of the Court 
itself in the various quarters of the Empire by means 
of Imperial circuits. 

That common Imperial law may be a distant pro- 
spect and must be a slow and gradual growth. The 
point of immediate value is the spirit of detachment 
in which the Privy Council is la5dng the foundations, 
and the hand-to-mouth method in which it works. Its 
fixed principle consists in the absence of fixed prin- 
ciples, and no legal dogma hampers its steps ; each 
case is considered on its merits and witli reference to 
the legal atmosphere in which it arises. Unity, let 
alone uniformity, is not the object of its acti\'ity, and 
it is logical only in its devotion to a liberty in which 
it believes but does not define. This is the very anti- 
thesis of self-conscious Kiiltiir claiming and seeking 
to impose itself on inferior civilizations ; and in that 
abdication consist its prospects of permanent sway. 
That, too, is the secret of empire. Metternich said that 
no Sovereign could afford to give away a particle of his 
sovereignty. We may not give it away, but we lease 



THE PARADOX OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 227 

it to the Dominions and get a handsome return. The 
British Empire does not hoard for itself ; it grants full 
powers of taxation and legislation ; it authorizes self- 
governing Dominions, and even India, to place tariffs 
on British goods and to exclude British subjects from 
their franchise and their borders. Thus half a century 
and more ago we cast our bread of liberty upon the 
waters, and after many days it has returned to us at 
Anzac, at Ypres, at Vimy, and in the presence at our 
councils of those who have fed upon it. Truly that 
franchise which is called the British Empire is justified 
in its children. 

The Empire, mdeed, is great not because of its 
size, but because of its diversity and of the spirit which 
enables that diversity to exist in harmony. Music is 
not made by monotony ; and the professors of their 
own Kultur are babes in the school of empire. We 
are, as General Smuts says, " not a State, but a com- 
munity of States and nations ... a whole world by 
ourselves consisting of many nations, of many States, 
and all sorts of communities under one flag ". That 
is not a novel conception in English history ; histori- 
cally our House of Commons is a communifas com- 
munitatum, a community of lesser communities ; and 
that historical diversity in unity may have saved us 
from the revolutionary State in wjhich a parvenu Ger- 
many has sought to fuse the distinctions of nature and 
nationahty. Every State, declares Treitschke, must 
have the right to merge into one the nationalities con- 
tained within itself, and he refers contemptuously to 
the " barren talk about a right of nationality ". Pro- 
ceedings in the Austrian Beichsrath suggest that the 
talk may not be so barren as Treitschke's disciples 

15* 



228 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

would wish ; and General Smuts's speech emphasizes 
once more the fundamental antagonism between Ger- 
man and British conceptions of empire. It is also a 
distinction between the British and all Empires of the 
past ; " all the Empires we have known in the past and 
that exist to-day are founded on the idea of assimila- 
tion, of trying to force human material into one mould. 
Your whole idea and basis is entirely different. You 
do not want to standardize the nations of the British 
Empire ; you want to develop them towards a greater 
nationahty." It is not, in fact, as has been stupidly 
said, the object of the British Empire to give every 
one of its subjects an English mind, but to give every 
one of them the fullest fi-eedom and scope to develop 
a mhid of his own. 

That diversity also brings the British Empire into 
line with the common aspiration of a war-sick world. 
It is the only permanent league of nations in existence, 
and its nations comprise all sorts and conditions of 
peoples. It is too large to be called a microcosm, but 
within its borders are represented every kind and every 
stage of ci\'ihzation. British statesmen have to deal 
with the whole world in samples, and their methods 
of dealing may well form an example to the rest. 
The root of their success has not been their material 
or their military but their moral strength ; and it is 
the moral quality in the British Empire which has 
confounded its domestic critics and its foreign foes. 
Unity is a form of selfishness unless it is spontaneous, 
and British Empire means a sacrifice of self. It is a 
communion of service which makes the British Empire 
one, and will make a commonwealth of nations ; and 
we achieve at-one-ment by bearing one another's bur- 
dens and understanding one another's mmd. 



XVII. 

THE PREVENTION OF WAR.^ 

A FEW weeks before this war broke out a careful 
student of political psychology pubhshed a book 
entitled " The Great Society," and the great society 
promptly plunged into well-nigh universal war. That 
ironical comment of history on philosophy seemed to 
negative the soHdarity of the world ; but the appear- 
ance was deceptive. Strife is often not merely a 
means to greater unity, but a symptom of its sub- 
conscious existence ; and the earhest signs that men 
are conscious of a unity are the battles they wage over 
its interpretation. Our civil wars of the fifteenth and 
seventeenth centuries were the gi'owing pains of na- 
tional unity. England was nearer to national soli- 
darity when it was divided into two national parties, 
Yorkist and Lancastrian, Cavaher and Roundhead, 
than when its factions were parochial or provincial ; 
and France was growing together when its people 
were merging from Normans, Bretons, Gascons, Pro- 
ven9als, and Burgundians into Huguenots or Catholics. 
The American Civil War was due to a growth of the 
conviction that the United States could not continue 
to speak with two voices on the subject of slavery 
or exist under the multitudinous sovereignty of its 

1 "The Times " Literary Supplement, 5 July, 1917. 

229 



230 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

various States. Perhaps even the vigour of faction 
in Ireland turns on the particular shade between 
orange and green which is to colour the whole of the 
Emerald Isle. 

That, too, is the secret of this war ; it is to deter- 
mine the complexion of the world, and the war is the 
civil war of the human race. It has become a world 
war, because the world has become a unity. Friction 
arises from proximity and not from isolation ; and the 
United States has been swept into the vortex because 
there are no longer two worlds, the New and the Old, 
but one. The first thing a society does when it be- 
comes self-conscious is to debate the articles of its 
association, and to determine the principles on which 
it shall be governed ; and the philosophy of Weltmacht 
ode?' Niedergang was a gauntlet thrown down on 
behalf of the contention that the State was Power, 
and that the mailed fist and shining armour were the 
arbiters of human fate. That was a challenge to the 
world, and the world could not remain indifferent, 
because it had become a great society of nations. 
" The world," says President Wilson, " no longer 
consists of neighbourhoods. The whole is linked 
together in a common life and interest such as hu- 
manity never saw^ before, and the starting of wars can 
never again be a private and individual matter for 
nations." Neutrality in this war has become an anti- 
social idiosyncrasy. 

Internationalism has thus, so fiir from being a 
dream, been made practical politics of the most insist- 
ent character by the war ; and there can be no settle- 
ment which is not a world-settlement. Even the 
no-settlement which a stalemate would iiuolve would 



TUB PREVENTION OF WAR 231 

be an unsettlement of the whole world, and every 
nation would have to arm for a conflict more hideous 
than this war, after a truce more restless than the 
armed peace since 1870. Apart from that militarist 
nightmare, which so-called pacifists would plan, the 
war must result either in a cosmopolitanism some- 
thing like the Roman Empire, with Prussia playing 
the part of Rome, or in a reign of law based upon 
consent. There is, therefore, nothing visionary or 
unreal in the discussion of proposals for an inter- 
national organization which is the only alternative to 
the ills we feel or fear. Nor is there likely to be any 
lack of the will-to-peace, which even in Germany is 
tending under the stress of circumstances to supplant 
the will-to-power ; and it was Germany that put the 
sand in the international machinery which before the 
war had worked with some success. Arbitration had 
made considerable strides, and most of the Great 
Powers had accommodated dangerous disputes during 
the preceding generation without recourse even to 
arbitration. It was only from German action or in- 
stigation that the peace of the world had much to 
fear ; and the penalties of war are leading even the 
Germans themselves along the path of penance to 
repentance. 

We can therefore agree with Lord Bryce ^ not 
merely that " every one seems to feel the approach 
of a supremely important moment," but also that 

1 " Proposals for the Prevention of Future Wars," by Viscount 
Bryce and others. (George Allen & Unwin. Is. net.) Speeches 
delivered by Viscount Bryce, O.M., General Smuts, the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, Lord Buckmaster, Lord Hugh Cecil, M.P., and others 
on 14 May, 1917. (League of Nations Society Publication No. 11.) 



232 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

the moment will be exceptionally favourable for the 
adoption of specific proposals for the prevention of 
future wars. It is the proposals themselves that are 
under consideration. They are reasonably modest 
and admittedly deal only with a part of the problem. 
In the first place, they are concerned only with inter- 
national disputes and with the means of preventing 
international wars. But there was war in the world 
before there were national wars, and when national 
wars are brought to an end it does not follow that 
wars v/ill cease. The century after the Reformation 
was an era of wars of religion, and when it closed at 
the Peace of Westphalia men may well have hoped 
that, with the elimination of religion as a cause of war, 
the reign of peace would ensue. But the ink was 
hardly dry on the treaties of peace when England 
and Holland, both of them Protestant States and 
both of them then republics, plunged into a war of 
tariffs and commerce, while France indulged in the 
civil wars of the Fronde. The destruction of Crom- 
well's militarism made no difference to EngHsh 
belligerency ; Stuart monarchy waged Dutch wars 
just like the Puritan Commonwealth, and a progres- 
sive Lord Chancellor opened Parliament in 1673 with 
a speech on the text Delenda est Carthago. Germany 
is the latest but not the last Carthage in the history 
of war, and nationalism is no more than religion the 
fundamental reason why men fight. 

" You must," as General Smuts remarked, " begin 
with the hearts of men ; " and no tribunal will save 
a world tliat wants to fight from figliting. Wars of 
religion, nationalism, and tariffs are often merely 
means of expressing the acquisitive and combative 



THE PREVENTION OF WAR 235 

instincts which humanity shares with the lower 
creation. Men have always fought, and have only 
changed the methods and objectives of their fighting. 
Universal and permanent peace can only come with 
the conviction that war, so far from being " poHtical 
science par excellence^' is an intolerable method of 
dealing with politics, economics, or religion. It has 
been eliminated as a method of sohdng religious 
problems, but there is food for varied thought in the 
facts that religion was eliminated as a cause of war 
before politics or economics, and that international 
pacifists in Russia have already begun to shed one 
another's blood in disputes over local autonomy, as 
though pacifist Russia were no more perfect than a 
belligerent Ireland. It is not beyond the bounds of 
possibility that the Governments in congress after this 
war will have more ado in keeping peace within their 
respective borders than in making peace between 
themselves ; and for the prevention of those wars the 
proposals before us provide no sort of remedy. 

They are confined to wars between nation and 
nation, and before the suggested tribunal for arbitra- 
tion and council for conciliation of national disputes 
can be established, it will have to be determined what 
a nation is, who are the nations with the right of 
appeal, and what are the national disputes they will 
be entitled or required to submit to international 
judgment. If, for instance, the protectorate which 
the Italians have just proclaimed over Albania should 
develop after the fashion of other protectorates, which 
will be the " nation " with the locus standi in the 
court of international conscience, Italy or Albania ? 
Will the future Albanian insurgents (and it is incon- 



234 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

ceivable that there should not be insurgents in Al- 
bania against an alien Government) be rebels in the 
eyes of international Europe or a comrade nation 
rightly struggling to be free ? Incidentally, too, the 
scheme commits us by implication to a somewhat 
drastic treatment of the Central Empu'es. It requires 
no exuberant imagination to envisage an independent 
Poland after the war not quite satisfied with the posi- 
tion of Poles left under German jurisdiction, or a 
Germany discontented with that of German subjects 
transferred with Polish lands to Polish rule. Their 
kindred would presumably be precluded from assisting 
the " helots " in other lands except after arbitration, 
if arbitration were admitted ; and the arbiters would 
have to take cognizance of the grievances alleged — 
that is to say, of the internal government of nations. 
They might be in a delicate situation ; for, however 
clearly the rights of nationalities are asserted, and 
however carefully and independently of military con- 
siderations the frontiers of new Europe are drawn, 
they will leave millions of men and women under 
more or less alien Governments, and the Slav-Teu- 
tonic imbroglio might be repeated in any quarter of 
the globe. 

The truth is that international politics cannot be 
divorced entirely from domestic politics ; Bismarck 
taught the Germans at home the principles his suc- 
cessors have applied abroad ; and international peace 
will not be secure until the hearts of men are tuned 
to concord with the strangers within their gates as 
well as with their fellows under other Governments. 
As President Wilson has pointed out, proposals to 
prevent wars in the future depend for their success 



THE PREVENTION OF WAR 235 

Upon the nature of the peace they are designed to 
preserve. There is no need to fear a Holy Alhance 
of Sovereigns against their subjects, but it will not be 
so easy to avoid an international council of majorities 
riding somewhat roughshod over dissentient minorities. 
It is comparatively easy to understand how such a 
council, if it had existed before the war, could have 
dealt with the Austro-Serbian dispute, but how 
would it have dealt with Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, 
Bohemia, Hungary, or the Trentino ? Would not its 
very success as a guardian of international peace have 
condemned to permanent subjection the minority 
peoples under the Governments by which the guar- 
dians would be chosen ? 

It is indeed easier, even in the climax of this war, 
to see how peace could be preserved by such an inter- 
national arrangement than to see how that peace could 
be made perfect. There are many kinds of peace, 
and it wears a different aspect according to the point 
of view. There was the peace that reigned in War- 
saw after a Polish insurrection, and the peace that 
broods over the land when men have made it a desert. 
We now repudiate all desire to restore the status quo, 
because the status quo produced the war. But if we 
had organized our international machinery for pre- 
venting future wars before this war broke out, should 
we not have been committed to the perpetuation of 
the status quo ? Stillness may be peace, but what we 
want is peace and progress, a peace that is based on 
movement, and not a stereotyped repose. There is 
something in the German talk of biological decisions, 
and we cannot regard the future as nothing but a 
prolongation of the present. The impossibility of a 



QS6 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

static world is indeed the problem which confronts all 
proposals for mere prevention. When we say that 
prevention is better than cure, we are thinking of 
diseases and their causes. But war is a symptom 
rather than the disease itself, and there is little use in 
preventing symptoms. The methods of preventive 
medicine are the promotion of health ; they are posi- 
tive rather than restrictive, and the best preventive of 
war is the removal of its causes and the promotion of 
peaceful conditions. 

The war itself is promoting those peaceful condi- 
tions which could never exist so long as the people of 
powerful States desired war and regarded it as the 
only means of obtaining the " biological decisions " 
they considered their natural right. The peace of 
Europe hung by a thread because of the German 
conviction, based on recent German liistory, that 
nothing paid Germany so well as war. The fallacy 
of INIr. Norman Angell's theory consisted not in his 
assumption that war does not pay, but in his assump- 
tion that men would recognize the fact. It is not 
the truth, but their view of the truth, that influences 
men's minds ; and the fact, if it be a fact, that war 
does not pay is no deterrent to those who believe that 
it does. No nation will come out of this war under 
that delusion ; and the causes of national wars will 
thereby be reduced. Nor is the danger of other than 
national wars really so serious. For under modern 
conditions the State alone can make war with any 
prospect of success for itself or of danger to the world 
at large. The history of Austria during the war 
shows how helpless are mere populations -without the 
material and the organization which the State alone 



THE PREVENTION OF WAR 237 

can provide. We may not accept Lord Hugh Cecil's 
dictum that nationalism is incompatible with Chris- 
tianity, but assuredly the irresponsible State, with its 
vast command of men and munitions and control of 
truth and communications, has proved an enemy to 
the peace of the world ; and if we can eliminate wars 
waged by the State we can regard with comparative 
equanimity the lesser evils of riots, rebellions, and 
international strikes. 

The problems of the State and of international 
relations are really one, and no plan for preventing 
national wars can succeed so long as the State re- 
mains omnicompetent and irresponsible. It is a 
German dogma and the ground on which Germans 
rejected arbitration, and again we are brought back 
to one of President Wilson's principles, that peace 
depends upon democracy — that is to say, upon the 
responsibility of all power. It will be a step in 
advance when every Government is responsible to 
its own people ; but internationahsm goes farther 
and requires that every Government shall also be 
responsible to the common arbitrament of an inter- 
national Court. It is not nationalism that is un- 
christian, but irresponsibility. The crime of which 
we have all been more or less guilty for generations 
is that we have been bent, as individuals and as 
States, on getting power rather than understanding 
and wisdom to direct it. Lord Bryce's proposals are 
sound enough so far as they go, but the motor will 
not move without its petrol ; and it is the spirit 
which is difficult to obtain. Fortunately, the spirit 
of peace does not grow scarcer with the prolongation 
of the war. 



XVIII. 

THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION.^ 

Nothing is new under the sun, and the oldest master 
of the science concluded his " Politics " with a dis- 
sertation on revolutions. But the waters of Lethe 
and the fountains of ignorance can turn the veriest 
truism mto paradox ; and the capacity of being sur- 
prised at the course of human affairs is not likely to 
disappear in a world of physical science which regards 
historical fact as irrelevant to present experience, and 
expects to probe the secrets of men's souls by means 
of the lens and of Rontgen rays. The historian, on 
the other hand, finds it difficult to determine which 
throws the greater light on the other, the past on the 
present, or the present on the past ; and he is content 
to leave the dispute with the conviction that neither 
can be understood without the other. Revolutions 
before his eyes help him to realize the forces and 
passions which produced revolutions in the past, and 
charts of earlier disturbances provide him with some 
indications of the probable course of present emotions. 
The value of the comparison is thus two-fold, 
academic and practical ; but the academic value is the 
less problematic. The careful study of a revolution 
in progi'ess will give the observer a much more certain 

' "The Times " Literary Supplement, 23 August, 1917. 

238 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 239 

light on the past than a knowledge of the past will 
throw on the present ; and the reason is that, how- 
ever assiduously we may cultivate and train the faculty 
of projecting our minds into other surroundings, we 
can never feel the past with the same vivid reality 
that we feel the present. George Washington once 
remarked with an approach to impatience that people 
can never see what they do not feel, and the same idea 
underlies the saying that the best political teacher is 
the tax collector. But the gibe is true of us all in 
different degrees according to the extent of our intelli- 
gence and imagination. Historians writing in a stable 
and pacific world are scornful of drum and trumpet his- 
tories and intolerant of all extenuations of the means by 
which less fortunate generations have made revolutions 
or preserved law and order. We read Taine on the 
French Revolution with less patience now that we 
have the problems of the Russian Revolution before 
our eyes, and are less enthusiastic about the sacred 
rights of the subject than we were when danger to the 
State appeared an unsubstantial bogey. We should 
be less horrified at a Committee of Public Safety, the 
guillotine, or a military dictatorship in Russia to-day 
than we were wont to be at similar phenomena when 
we encountered them in our histories of the French 
Revolution ; and our toleration would not be entirely 
due to the fact that the Russians are our Allies while 
the French Revolutionists were our foes. 

No doubt that change of circumstance facilitates 
bur sympathy with any methods that may restore 
efficiency to the Russian Government, discipline to its 
armies, and strength to the common cause ; and we 
should be much more critical of similar methods em- 



240 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

ployed at Berlin or Vienna. But it is our natural want 
of sympathy with our enemies that makes it so difficult 
for us to interpret and forecast the course of German 
politics ; indeed, no history of Germany written by a 
patriotic Englishman during this war is likely to be 
of more value or more read by posterity than the his- 
tories of France which our ancestors wrote during 
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. For similar 
reasons a CathoHc cannot write a decent history of 
Puritanism, nor an Evangelical of the Oxford Move- 
ment ; and there is a bias of the age, as well as a bias 
of Church and of Party. The fact that it is his duty 
to resist this bias will always make the historian un- 
popular except with those to whose bias he panders. 
He is driven, by the necessity of trying to understand 
the people and the movements he is describing, to 
cultivate sympathy ; and sympathy with a variety of 
standards appears to the moralist as moral indifference 
and to the mathematician as scientific inexactitude. 
Most of us can only understand those historical phen- 
omena with which we sympathize. That is why 
history is so much a matter of partisanship, and weak- 
kneed historians often contend that it can never be 
anything else. However that may be, our present 
outlook enables us to sympathize with, and therefore 
to understand, revolutions better than we did, and 
particularly the French Revolution of 1789. With 
our apprehension fixed upon the proceedings of the 
Finnish Diet and the Ukraine Rada, we can under- 
stand the unpopularity in which the Girondins were 
involved by their federalist propensities ; and the ex- 
Tsaritsa has made more intelligible the French fury 
against IVIarie Antoinette. 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 241 

But appreciation I of the Russian Revolution as 
throwing light on the French will be caviare to the 
general, and it is less academic to look to the French 
Revolution for Hght on the probable course of events 
in Russia. Not that there were no revolutions before 
1789 or that there is nothing to be learnt from them 
of value for the present. Aristotle, as we have said, 
has a good deal about revolutions and their diagnosis. 
He regards them as an endemic disease requiring 
almost clinical treatment ; and revolution was never 
far from the doors of the Greek city State. But the 
o-Tctcrets of which he writes were revolutions after the 
manner of those which characterized medieeval city 
States, and, more recently, States in the Balkans or 
South American Repubhcs. They were mostly fac- 
tion-fights fought under conditions which have little 
in common with the circumstances and the ideas of 
the modern world ; and the natural history of revolu- 
tions can hardly be said to have begun until the 
abolition of slavery and serfdom brought politics 
within the reach of the mass of men. Hence we trace 
the germs of modern revolutionary doctrine to the 
Jacquerie of fourteenth-century France, to the preach- 
ing of John Ball at the time of our Peasants' Revolt, 
to the Twelve Articles of the German Peasants' War 
in 1524-5, and to the Levellers of the Commonwealth. 
It is they or their descendants who make the real 
revolutions, and the nativitas or naivete which char- 
acterized the nativus, or serf, is essential to the genuine 
revolutionist ; only half a century separates the Russian 
Revolution from Alexander II 's edict of emancipation. 
It is his simplicity which makes the revolutionist so 

attractive and so unpractical ; and when he loses it he 

16 



242 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

becomes a politician, a man about town, instead of a 
native son of the soil. Revolutions are not made, 
though they may be manipulated, by the sophisticated. 
The man of the world does not see visions and dream 
dreams ; the mirage only appears to those who are 
athirst ; and no statesman thinks of abandoning " the 
meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and 
statute " for short cuts to a new heaven and a new 
earth. Those ways only appeal to inexperienced 
travellers, and revolutions occur for the most part 
among people not accustomed to govern themselves. 
There have been other revolutions, like our own in 
1688-9, so respectable as hardly to deserve the name ; 
the expulsion of James II resembled the recent ex- 
pulsion of Constantine, and it is a sound instmct which 
gives the name of " revolution " to the Russian crisis 
but denies it to the Greek. 

The technical definition of a revolution is a con- 
stitutional change which has to be carried out by 
unconstitutional means. An ampler description would 
be, " evolution telescoped," or *' fusion while you wait ". 
The revolutionist attempts to do what Nature never 
does and to accomplish things by leaps ; the work 
of ages is packed into one concentrated moment of 
delirious enthusiasm. It is a question of political 
chemistry against poHtical biology, and the dynamite 
of social dogma is invoked to remedy the tardiness of 
growth. The revolutionist wants to explode the earth 
on the chance of being blown to heaven, and no re- 
ligious zealot is more bent on " other- worldliness ". 
Faith that is not accordhig to knowledge and action 
that ignores experience are the essence of revolutions ; 
they begin with an idealism which sobers under the 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 243 

blows of practical^ realization. The revolutionist is 
conscious of his innocence ; he finds a scapegoat in the 
old autocracy for all existing social sins ; he heaps 
them on its head, and drives it out into the wilderness. 
For the blissful moment the people are without sin ; 
what need of penal codes, or at least of capital punish- 
ment ? A Russian convicted of forty crimes asked 
for liberty that he might use his great influence with 
the people, not as an awful example or as a brand 
saved from the burning, but as a hero in the fight for 
the faith against law and order. For order was the 
old order, and law was the Tsar's ukase ; forty crimes 
against law and order were so many blows at the police 
and so many titles to revolutionary virtue. It is, 
however, easier to drive our scapegoat into the wilder- 
ness than to exorcise inherited instincts ; and the per- 
sistence of crime after the abolition of its penalties 
constrains the revolutionist in time to distinguish 
between the virtuous properties of law and order and 
the vicious accidents of Tsardom. Orgies of robbery 
and violence, generally followed by lynching on a 
comprehensive scale, convince the libertarian that 
strong government, so far from being the imposition 
of tyrants and the perquisite of Tories, is the first of 
communal needs and the only guarantee of freedom. 
The disorder of revolutions is a temporary consequence 
of the divorce which autocracy makes between govern- 
ment and communal feeling. 

There is nothing new in the Russian phenomena 
of anarchy, and every incident in it might be paralleled 
from the history of France in 1790-2. So, too, might 
that pacifism which has so disturbed our calculations 
of the war. It is another aspect of the clouds of 

16* 



244. THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

idealism which revolutions trail with them at their 
birth. 

Meanwhile prophetic harps 
In every grove were ringing " War shall cease ; 
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured ? " 

So sang Wordsworth, and Burke referred in 1790 to 
" the once- warlike Gauls ". The pacifism of France 
in that year helped us to a pacific settlement with 
Spain over the Nootka Sound affair, which ultimately 
gave to English-speaking peoples control of the eastern 
shores of the North Pacific. The pacifist boot is on 
an ally's and not on an enemy's foot to-day ; but 
revolutionary Russia may outgrow that measure as 
fast as revolutionary France, and despite themselves 
the Germans will help in the development. They 
will not, indeed, repeat the folly of Brunswick's pro- 
clamation and wage war on the Russian people to 
restore a Russian autocracy ; but the easier and the 
greater their advance into Russia the more difficult 
will peace become between Prussian junkers and 
Russian democracy, and the German invasion of 
Russia may have results not unlike the Prussian 
advance to Valmy. 

The idealism of the Russian Revolution is indeed 
compounded of the same mixture of egotism and 
altruism as was the French. Each people imagined 
itself to have lit upon a sovereign cure for human ills, 
and in their concentration on that specific they became 
indifferent to the views and interests of other peoples. 
One regarded political revolution and the other regards 
social revolution as a panacea ; just as the Jacobins 
would have driven all Europe into republican freedom, 
so the Leninists would constrain us all to adopt tlie 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 24-5 

communist faith. Peace for the cottage and war on 
the castle is at the bottom of both their international 
missions, and Anacharsis Clootz was the prototype of 
many a member of the Soviet of Petrograd. The 
rights of little nations sink into insignificance com- 
pared with the Rights of Man. The greater in- 
cludes the less, and international Maximahsts are Httle 
concerned with national minutiae. Revolution, they 
think, should begin Hke charity at home : after Russia, 
her Allies must be converted ; and then will be time 
to deal with the foe. The Germans naturally agree ; 
and in the forefront of the International programme 
for Stockholm appeared a series of questions relating 
to national rights of self-government in Persia, Mor- 
occo, TripoH, Egypt, Malta, and so forth ; it would be 
excellent if the restoration of Belgium and Poland 
could be postponed until such problems were settled, 
and their discussion might relieve the Prussians of 
aU anxieties about the war, and incidentally settle the 
fate of international ideahsm. Revolutionists might 
be statesmen if Junkers were equally naif; but the 
dove with all its innocence cannot afford to leave all 
the wisdom to the serpent. 

Experience is, however, an excellent if an exacting 
teacher, and the simpHcity of revolutionists is due to 
their past exclusion from public affairs. Events move 
more quickly, with railways, newspapers and the tele- 
graph, than they did a century and a quarter ago ; and 
the Russians are learning the lessons of practical 
pohtics faster than did the French. MiHtary discipline 
will probably be restored in less time than the two 
years and more it took in the French Revolution ; 
and if the Russians have hampered their generals by 



246 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

sending civil commissioners to control them and by 
making civic virtue an avenue to military rank, the 
French Convention did the same. When the first 
French Revolutionary offensive was planned against 
the Austrians in Belgium, two of the armies did noth- 
ing and the third considerably less ; it threw down 
its arms in face of the foe, ran for its base at Lille, 
and revenged itself by murdermg its general ; and the 
future soldiers of Napoleon set precedents as dangerous 
as those of BrusilofF's troops. Seven Marshals of the 
Empire owed their initial promotion to election by the 
rank and file. Davoust first signalized himself by 
heading a mutiny against his commanding officer ; and 
Napoleon owed his rise to his success against Toulon 
and then against the mob in Paris. Kronstadt has 
not yet gone so far as Toulon, and the " whiff* of 
grapeshot " has not yet sent sprawling the hons of 
Petrograd. It is to be hoped that neither episode 
will need repetition ; for a militarist Russian demo- 
cracy, while it would make short work of the Central 
Empires, would greatly disturb its Allies, and post- 
pone to a very distant future the pacification of the 
world. 

The parallelism between the French and Russian 
Revolutions goes far because they are two of the most 
elemental movements of mankind, and the repetitions 
of history arise from the fundamental unity of human 
nature. But the fact that water always consists of 
two parts of hydrogen to one of oxygen will not give 
us the direction of any particular tide or the strength 
of any particular wave ; and the forces which play 
upon human nature are so infinite in their variety that 
the result transcends the possibility of accurate cal- 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 247 

dilation. But just as the absence of uniformity in 
the weather is no reflection upon the science of mete- 
orology, so the perennial paradoxes of human affairs 
cast no stigma upon the science of history, though it 
is so new a science that few are aware of its existence, 
and still fewer understand it. All new sciences, 
moreover, have to struggle with tares, and in its early 
days chemistry was alchemy to the general public, 
and astronomy was astrology. The science of history, 
like that of meteorology, has to eschew the meretrici- 
ous popularity of Zadkiel and Old Moore, and to warn 
its students against the falseness of the analogies which 
underlie the notion that historical repetitions are as 
simple as recurring decimals. We can, however, point 
to certain phenomena, the comparative regularity of 
which constitutes a presumption, though it never 
amounts to more than a probability ; and it must be 
remembered that success in the arts of statesmanship 
and war depends absolutely upon the capacity of those 
who practise them to measure these human proba- 
bihties. Revolutions are obviously less calculable 
than more normal developments, but even revolutions 
are subject to certain conditions which a physical 
scientist might call " laws ". 

Anarchy, for instance, is an inevitable accompani- 
ment of those sudden subversions of government 
which we term revolutions ; and there is nothing to 
surprise us in the disorder of Russia except perhaps 
the comparative rapidity and skill which her states- 
men have shown in coping with it. But anarchy, 
while inevitable for a period, is always temporary ; it 
is so intolerable an evil that the least competent 
communities sooner or later find a remedy, and even 



248 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

Mexico, left to itself, is returning to law and order. 
Neither the Germans nor the war will be fatal to 
Russia's domestic salvation. Revolutions, indeed, 
have little to fear from external foes, and it is astonish- 
ing how seldom autocracy has been able to beat demo- 
cracy at war. The contrary impression seems to come 
from that hazy recollection of the Peloponnesian War 
which does duty for a knowledge of history with so 
many educated people ; but a historical scholarsliip 
limited to ancient Greece might remind us that the 
Persian Empire did not win the battles of Marathon 
and Salamis. In modern times democracy has almost 
invariably had the best of the fighting. France herself 
was never led to defeat by a Republican Government ; 
Waterloo and Sedan were lost by her Emperors. 
Swiss history is one long tale of democratic success in 
defence ; two Dutch provinces defied the arms of 
Philip II, and thirteen American colonies the might 
of the British Empire. Democracy is more prone to 
suicide than liable to conquest. 

Some Russians have represented the war as an 
intolerable burden for the Revolution to bear ; but it 
may be doubted whether peace would cut the roots of 
faction. The war imposes some restraint on domestic 
animosities ; and war to-day is a trivial danger to 
Russia compared with its menace to the French Re- 
volution in 1793. France had not an ally and hardly 
a friend in Europe ; more than half the world to-day 
is Russia's ally and friendly to the Revolution ; she 
has no La Vendue on her hands, no emig7TS, and no 
outraged Church. If the war were brought home to 
the Russians as it was to the French in 1792-3, there 
would be less fear of Russian disunion ; and external 



THE WAYS OF REVOLUTION 249 

peace bought by surrender and compromise, and con- 
cluded before Russia has found domestic unity, would 
endanger the Revolution far more than the German 
invasion. Our own civil wars would have ended 
sooner, had we not been left at liberty to fight them 
without external constraint. The peril to Russia is 
not the war, but social disintegration, and it is a peril 
which no one else can avert ; if she is true to her 
Allies she cannot be false to herself. 



XIX. 

A PARABLE OF THE WAR.^ 

In commenting on what it conceived to be the parlous 
prospects of Germany after the taking of Vimy Ridge, 
an Itahan newspaper put the following pleasant 
conundrum to its readers : If such triumphs can be 
achieved by British arms alone, what will be the Ger- 
man situation when the real military Powers of the 
Entente begin their spring campaigns ? The question 
was ingenuous enough ; but the distinction drawn be- 
tween military and non-military Powers serves to 
remind us of the fact, the significance of which is con- 
siderable, that if the Entente wins this war, the issue 
will have been determined by the intervention of two 
Powers whose expeditionary forces when it began did 
not between them equal the army of a single Balkan 
State. If militarism is defeated, it will be because 
pacifist peoples went to war and civilian communities 
were converted into crusaders ; and the keynote of 
the fourth year of the war, on which we are now enter- 
ing, will be the mobilization for the common cause of 
a commonwealth pre-eminent in its passion for peace 
and more remote than any other from the occasion 
and cause of the conflict. The Russian Revolution, 
stupendous though it is, pales as a portent in human 
affairs before the appearance of the United States as 

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement, 2 August, 1917. 
250 



A PARABLE OF THE WAR 251 

a formidable military Power bent on the battle for 
peace in the heart of Europe. 

It is the military effect of this conversion from 
peace to war that absorbs our attention at the moment, 
and if we think of its cost at all, we think of its cost 
in terms of men and of money. Later we may think 
of its cost in the sacrifice of ancient ideals and be 
troubled about the permanence or transience of our 
conversion. If the sacrifice of British Kultur is the 
secret of British empire, a similar sacrifice of the 
cherished Anglo-Saxon inlieritance of individual 
hberty and preference of the force of argument to the 
argument of force is, so far as the two great English- 
speaking communities are concerned, the outstanding 
moral of the war. But British empire is, we hope, 
permanent ; war is transitory. Will the effects of the 
conversion be transitory too ? Or will the conquered 
Hun triumph in his defeat, and point to a pacifism 
beaten by the force of arms and the philosophy of 
war ? Shall we emerge a conscript people, converted 
in spite of ourselves to the precept and practice of our 
foes, and regard peace itself as dependent on weapons 
of war and science as an agent for human destruc- 
tion ? Have we indeed sacrificed the things in which 
we beUeved because they were bad, and adopted our 
enemies' methods and creeds because they are better ? 
Is war the chmax of pohtics, or is militarism the real 
as well as the philological antithesis of civilization ? 
Whose creed is to triumph in and after the conflict, 
the Germans' or our own ? Are we to be changed, or 
are they ? Upon the answer to that question depend 
ahke the value of our sacrifice and the future of the 
world. 



252 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

The Prussian at least has no doubt, whatever may- 
be the searchings of other German minds. " You 
see," he says in effect, " we were right after all, and 
in practice you admit it by manifold imitation. You 
have adopted conscription, gagged your Press, sus- 
pended your constitutional guarantees and your sacred 
rights of liberty. You have had to treat conscience, 
unless it agreed with your own, as an offence against 
the law, and to penalize with imprisonment and hard 
labour a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the 
IVIount. Some of your public bodies have even been 
trying, so far as they could, to reduce to beggary and 
starvation the wives and children of their employees 
who thought that your ' glorious revolution of 1688 ' 
had guaranteed them civil and rehgious liberty, for- 
getting, poor fools, tliat it guaranteed them against 
everything except the only thing they really had to 
fear — an Act of Parliament. In the name of that 
liberty you have forced your countrymen to do what 
they thought was sin and to kill their fellow-men in 
a cause they believed was wi'ong. Your latter-day 
State has wrought more persecution than ever did the 
Church of the Middle Ages. We also have done 
these things, but we have done them fi-ankly. We 
proclaim that necessity knows no law, that reason of 
State is the supreme criterion ; and Bernhardi lias 
taught us that the Christian code has no relevance to 
the conduct of nations towards their neighbours. But 
you have reviled him as a blasphemer, and tlien, still 
reviling, have practised his precepts. Are you still 
shocked at the byword of British hypocrisy ? Your 
horror of poison gas was as primitive as the Matabele 
horror of your machine-guns ; but you soon overcame 



A PARABLE OF THE WAR 253 

it, when you realized that poison paid, and you made 
yourselves adepts in its use. You are rapidly over- 
coming your pious objections to what you were pleased 
to call the murder of women and children ; and you 
would bring yourselves up to the scratch of torpedo- 
ing hospital ships, if there were any German hospital 
ships for you to torpedo and you had no other means 
of preventing their use and abuse. Your moral in- 
dignation appears to have been mere petulant anger 
at being unprepared to do the things for which you 
hold us up to reprobation. War after all is science, 
and only your stupidity led you to deny that to pure 
science morality is an impertinence. 

" You prate of your wisdom in judgment, but 
what is the use of judgment against reekmg tube and 
iron shard ? You may keep your judgment, and we 
will keep our powers of execution. Do not talk to 
us about the verdict of history ; the history that pos- 
terity reads is wi'itten by those who conquer. Do you 
read Persian accounts of Marathon and Salamis ? 
Did the scribes of Hannibal and Mithradates write the 
history of Rome you teach in your schools and col- 
leges ? and would you beheve them if they had ? 
Victrix causa deis placuit, and you yourselves beheve 
that the will of God is expressed on the field of battle 
whenever you gain the victory. Enjoying the pace 
Ge7v?ianica, the world will hold as cheap your queru- 
lous tales of Belgian atrocities and " Lusitania " crimes 
as you do the pages in which Gildas laments the 
Schrecklichkeit of those Teutonic invaders from whom 
you inherit what vigour you possess, or the Irish tirades 
against the methods of blood and iron by which you 
reduced to law and order that distressful country ; and 



254 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

it will trouble itself as little about ' scraps of paper ' 
as you do about your broken Treaty of Limerick or 
the Sand River Convention. Even if we fail in this 
war, we shall have achieved the moral triumph of 
converting you to our philosophy and teaching you 
the methods of success. Your brutal majority of 
three to one against us and your superior weight of 
armament will merely demonstrate the truth of what 
we have said ; and at least we shall be the heroes of 
this war, as much as Satan is of * Paradise Lost,' 
though the paradise you have lost was a greater fools' 
paradise than Adam's." 

So Satan might have boasted at the Incarnation 
that he had converted Heaven and dragged Divinity 
down to a human level ; and orthodoxy has it that 
the Devil would have been right. There was no other 
way ; he had so corrupted the world that only God 
could redeem it. There must be a descent ii*om 
heaven before there could be an ascent from hell, a 
humiliation of the Divine for the sake of human sal- 
vation. The Prussian has so polluted the earth that 
the rest and the best of mankind had to descend into 
the mire to cleanse the defilement away. The descent, 
the humiliation, and the suffering are not good things 
in themselves, but only as sacrifice. It is the spirit 
that matters, and the purpose that sanctifies the 
squalor of the via dolorosa. We have not trodden the 
narrow way because it was narrow, but because it 
alone led to our goal ; and we need not be ashamed 
of our present decision because we are sore let and 
hindered by sins of the past. We have not gagged 
our Press because we disliked our freedom, nor penal- 
ized conscience because we believed in persecution and 



A PARABLE OF THE WAR ^55 

felt no shame in oppression, but because to this extent 
the Prussian has triumphed. There was no other 
way ; we had to stoop to conquer, and to borrow his 
weapons in order to beat him. We did not invent 
them and we do not use them with any pleasure to 
ourselves ; the Prussian may glory in his original sin. 

It was not to make the world more Prussian that 
we, and still less the United States, descended into the 
arena. They stepped down from their peaceful 
Olympus because it was clear that militarism could 
not be defeated by military peoples, and because the 
flood threatened to submerge even the Pisgahs of 
human progress. America has not cast its pacifism 
into the common cauldron of the war in order to make 
the whole world militarist, but to redeem it all from 
the sword ; and humanity has become one in its efforts 
to exorcise the Devil. The temptation was severe to 
preserve the purity of the Pharisee, to protect the 
hems of pacifist robes from the contamination of blood, 
and to stand aloof hke Sinn Fein — that apotheosis of 
national selfishness which remains indifferent to the 
martyrdom of other little nations in order to save 
itself in a world nicely balanced between ruin and re- 
demption, and hopes to appeal to a future congress of 
peoples on the ground that it helped to impede the 
common cause which that congress will represent. 
America has not so loved itself that it had no bowels 
of compassion for the world. It has taken upon it the 
form of conscription, and made itself bond that others 
may be free ; and in this plunge into humanity, this 
incarnation of the spirit. He our hope of peace after 
war and our refutation of Prussian blasphemers. 

For the means are not the end. Faith may suffer 



256 THE COMMONWEALTH AT WAR 

an eclipse in this crucifixion of mankind ; the whole 
race may partake in the agony of redemption, and 
may repeat on a wider scale in the present the throes 
of past liberations. It is less a vicarious sacrifice than 
it was, and the commonwealth of man has to redeem 
itself in the footsteps of its leader. The example 
pointed the way, but alone it is not enouglx The old 
Europe, the old world, the old peace had to die in 
order that a new Europe, a new world, and a new 
peace might arise from the hecatombs of war. The 
end was not in the darkness when the veil of the 
Temple was rent and men scoffed at the light which 
failed in the eyes of the flesh. There was Easter to 
follow ; and an Easter will follow the blackness and 
desolation of this war, to the confusion of those who 
dragged men into its depths. Protestant and Catholic 
Churches may deplore a decline in the orthodoxy of 
the letter and the rite ; but the world has never seen 
an age with a larger faith or a nobler portion of the 
spirit of self-sacrifice. It was no forlorn hope or 
counsel of despair that led Belgium to defend her right 
and the right of other peoples ; it was not doubt and 
disbelief that drew millions of Enghsh volunteers or 
the gi'cat American Kepublic into the conflict. Their 
fight is an act of faith, and their faith will make whole 
the community of man. If our mind is intent for the 
moment on a recessional mood, it is only a pause in 
our procession towards an end in which war and its 
Prussian abominations, its cruelties and its corruption, 
its hatreds and its deceits, will all be swallowed up in 
victory. 

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